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Delivering civic technology

What we learned from building a pool of agile vendors

By Rebecca Refoy-Sidibe , Alla Goldman Seiffert
July 26, 2018 acquisition services agile bpa procurement lessons learned

In 2015, 18F had an idea for a better way for federal agencies to hire private vendors to build products and services using agile development techniques. We wanted to see what would happen if we used an existing government process (called a blanket purchase agreement) and tailored it to the needs of agencies looking to update their digital services.
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Taking the ATO process from 6 months to 30 days

By Aidan Feldman
July 19, 2018 security lessons learned how we work

Security compliance is a major factor in launching a software system in the federal government. The Authority To Operate compliance process for systems within our division of GSA was taking more than six months for every system. With the new process, we have cleared the backlog and reduced the turnaround time to under a month.
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Five contracting tweaks that have yielded 18F better procurements (thus far)

By Alla Goldman Seiffert , Rebecca Refoy-Sidibe , Mark Headd , Randy Hart , Steven Reilly
July 17, 2018 acquisition services rfp ghostwriting procurement lessons learned

Here are five procurement hacks — both in the context of our Agile Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) and in general — that we’ve made in the past few years to make the procurement process a bit more joyful and effective.
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The case for open source software

By Ian Lee
July 12, 2018 open source open government

Software is everywhere at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Much of their software portfolio is open source. They began releasing software in the 1990s — long before the Federal Source Code Policy required government institutions to make their code available to each other and to release at least 20 percent to the public.
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Introducing Accessibility for Teams

By Maya Benari
July 10, 2018 accessibility design product launch

The Accessibility Guild in the Technology Transformation Services (TTS) at the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) set out to understand how people in different roles practice accessibility. We asked designers, developers, and product managers across our organization to share their accessibility practices, from self-testing to asking for help.
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