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TOPP is a technology-driven social enterprise. Our projects leverage the Web to create a more open, engaged society.

We develop open source software, media products, and other projects that help people to come together to solve big problems.

In New York, for example, we helped change the city’s approach to transportation planning. We did this by bringing together community stakeholders in the New York City Streets Renaissance, and by developing political mobilizers like Streetfilms.org and Streetsblog.org. This work brought average people into the planning process like never before, and it succeeded in re-orienting city planning toward walkable, bikeable streets.

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The Open Planning Project

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Use Open Standards for City Services like 311 and Transit D

Cities can develop solutions more efficiently if they collaborate using open standards and open source. Several major cities (NYC, Toronto, D.C., more) are already coming together to help develop an open standard for 311 services with Open311. Cities and developers are also coming together to share solutions for transit, Open Trip Planner for example. Cities first have to open up their public data and civic technology if they want to benefit from developer communities and other cities. As a brilliant example of sharing, the open data and open source legislation that was recently presented in Portland actually borrowed some of the language from similar legislation in Vancouver.

- Philip Ashlock, TOPP Labs, The Open Planning Project, NYC

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