18F Blog

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.

Jacob Harris joined 18F in May of 2015 after nine years working as a developer at The New York Times. He currently works on the Micro-purchase Platform, which enables vendors to place bids on opportunities to deliver open source code that costs $3,500 or less.

This spring, the eRegulations Notice & Comment team began building out a new feature set for the platform. To demo the work as we iterated on it, we faced a challenge of finding a way to do connect frequently with the dozens of interested parties. We settled on live streaming our demos through a video website that is accessible by most government agencies, doesn’t require extraneous plugins to operate, allows you to easily stream, but also automatically creates a viewable file afterwards at the same URL.