18F Blog

To continue our birthday celebrations, we’re saluting those projects and partners that inspired our team to do their best to improve the user experience of government. We asked staff from acquisitions to strategy to share what project they loved working on during the past year.

It’s been five years since we launched 18F, and we’ve grown a lot since that day — in size, in focus, and in impact. We wanted to celebrate our fifth birthday with a look back at what we’ve accomplished, what we’ve learned along the way, and where we’re headed next.

The U.S. Data Federation Project is an initiative of the GSA Technology Transformation Services 10x program, which seeks to address the need for knowledge sharing, repeatable processes, and reusable tools for federated data efforts.

At 18F, we often advocate for modular contracting — the practice of breaking up large, custom software procurements into a small constellation of smaller contracts. In doing so, we’ve learned that we’re more effective when promoting that message to people who are familiar with the fundamentals of modern software development practices.