Blog posts by Andre Francisco:

In September, Singapore launched the govBuy Marketplace, adapted from the Technology Transformation Service’s (TTS) Micro-Purchase Marketplace. Both sites are an auction platform designed to connect government teams to small businesses ready to solve small technical problems using open source code. The code that powers both platforms is also open source.

If you’re looking for a way to have an impact on the digital services the government provides to the public, now’s your opportunity. The Presidential Innovation Fellows program is currently accepting applications for the Spring 2017 cohort.

Last week, U.S. Chief Information Officer Tony Scott announced the launch of code.gov, another important milestone in the federal government’s adoption of open source code. The new site provides access to more than 50 open source projects from 13 federal agencies.

The Technology Transformation Service (TTS) is already absorbing the first-mover risk of introducing modern tools and techniques, but we know that only with the help of industry will this transformation be able to spread across the federal government. As we all bring agile methodologies, human-centered design, and modular design to the government, the opportunity to improve federal digital services is immense.

Today, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began asking the public to comment on a new proposed rule that would affect how the EPA tracks hazardous waste as it moves around the country. This rule is also the pilot of the new notice and comment feature of the eRegulations platform.

The most important advice I give 18F staff while they’re working on a blog post is to define their audience as clearly and as narrowly as possible. This focus has helped us overcome numerous hurdles to publishing quality blog posts, and it’s also the part of our new Blogging Guide that I’m most excited about.

Over the past year, members of our distributed team have given talks in over 30 locations about how we’re changing government digital services. Topics have ranged from how we work to how we help the government build and buy software to how people can join the 18F team.

Through a partnership with the Department of Health and Human Services, 18F was able to work with California’s Department of Social Services and Office of Systems Integration on the replacement of California's Child Welfare System. We helped them simplify the contracting documents and incorporate modular contracting, agile development, user-centered design, and open source practices into their project.

Across the pond, the motto of the United Kingdom's Government Digital Service (GDS) is “the strategy is delivery.” Over here, we say “delivery is the strategy,” but we’re both focused on the same thing: Fostering positive change across government by shipping quality digital solutions.

We’re immensely happy to hear that the president has issued an executive order ensuring the Presidential Innovation Fellows program has a permanent place in our government.

In this video from the recent moveForward(100); event, Eric Maland of USDS explains the new improvements to the healthcare.gov application system, and how his team of eight developers helped save taxpayers tens of millions of dollars per year.

The cover story in this month’s Fast Company offers a great metaphor to better explain the relationship of 18F, the U.S. Digital Service headquarters, and the digital teams inside various agencies.

When Nepal was hit with a devastating earthquake on April 25, the folks at MapGive and others in the OpenStreetMap community sprang into action, organizing volunteer mappers and coordinating with mapping teams on the ground in Kathmandu.

See the power of open data and open source software in this presentation about analytics.usa.gov from 18F’s Leah Bannon and Charles Worthington of the U.S. Digital Service.