18F Blog

The Federal Source Code Policy, which was signed this year, requires federal agencies to inventory their custom software and make the inventory available for consumption and display by code.gov (among other things). The most pressing work in building code.gov was defining a software metadata schema — a way for agencies to format the details of the software they’ve built.

Like all federal employees, we don't work on Thanksgiving. We do work on the day after, though, and this year we thought we'd pause to take a moment and reflect. Here are a few things that we're thankful for, what brings meaning to our lives, and what brings us to work every day.

We’ve published a vulnerability disclosure policy for 18F's parent organization, GSA's Technology Transformation Service, which lays out rules of the road for reporting vulnerabilities to various TTS-operated systems. We want a clear path for security researchers to tell us about vulnerabilities on our systems, and to assure those researchers that we won’t pursue legal action against them.

This is the story of how the State of California changed direction on a $500 million IT project for Child Welfare Services. To a large degree it’s about technology. But it‘s also about leadership, changing frames for assessing risk, and relationships based on trust.