18F Blog

Holly Allen came to 18F from Dreamworks Animation and the Public Library of Science. She joined 18F in pursuit of a way "to use technology to address big societal problems." After hearing about the U.S. Digital Service and 18F from US Chief Technology Officer, Megan Smith, she was inspired to join.

When 18F started, deploying government services into a public cloud was still fairly uncommon. However, everything 18F has built has been deployed into Amazon Web Services (AWS), including cloud.gov. Over that time, our AWS account has grown in size and complexity and we needed a new approach to make sure it remains manageable.

We’ve put together a list of facts and references that will help you build the case for open source development in your team or agency and bust myths about using public code repositories. This post is based on our experiences at the federal level, but we hope it’s helpful for anyone working in government.

The Digital Acquisition Accelerator, a program run by the Presidential Innovation Fellows and 18F, launched in early June. Through this program, cross-functional teams from two agencies — the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Federal Bureau of Investigation — are learning to build two products each using modern product management practices. During week two of the Accelerator, the teams applied what they learned in an inception workshop. This is the third in a series of three blog posts that describe the step-by-step process of the workshop.