Blog

July 13, 2016

3 ways for digital acquisition teams to work better

By Amy Wilson , Clara Tsao

As we work through this pilot phase of the Digital Acquisition Accelerator, we’ll be sharing our work and the lessons we learn. We hope this will help other interested teams follow along and also give the public on opportunity to give us feedback on our pilot. Here are three techniques that our team practiced with the FBI and Treasury teams during the recent kickoff of the pilot.

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July 11, 2016

A conversation about static and dynamic websites

By Greg Boone , Will Slack

Our blog uses Jekyll, a static file generator with a basic templating system, as the backend software. Deploying our blog posts this way has simplified our publishing process.

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July 7, 2016

When a micro-purchase doesn’t work out, we try to learn from it

By Michael Torres , V. David Zvenyach

Two months ago, the 18F acquisitions team ran a public micro-purchase auction to find a vendor to develop a small new feature for 18F's cloud.gov, and for the first time after several successful micro-purchases for other products, the contracted vendor didn’t deliver the code on time. This was very interesting to us we’re early in the life of the micro-purchase platform, and we believe that failure is a great way to learn. In the spirit of experimentation and sharing our lessons, here’s how we went about analyzing this, and here’s what we learned.

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July 6, 2016

Illinois fourth grade class uses Every Kid in a Park to explore national parks and beyond

By Melody Kramer

One fourth grade class in Monticello, Illinois used the Every Kid in the Park website to learn more about National Parks and create a project for their school’s annual open house. We reached out to Washington Elementary fourth grade teacher Robyn Garrett to learn more about how she used national parks in her curriculum.

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June 30, 2016

6 ways a writing lab will help your organization

By Kate Garklavs

Wondering if a writing lab might be right for your organization? Reviewing the benefits 18F has seen from our Writing Lab might help you figure out if starting your own is the way to go.

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