Blog

December 8, 2015

Learning how to build a better “front door” for the federal government

By Colin MacArthur , Carolyn Dew , Michelle Chronister

Over the last several months, staff from General Service Administration’s USAGov and 18F teams have been talking to Americans around the country about the good, the bad, and the ugly of interacting with their federal government. The goal of the research is to gain a better understanding of how we can build a better “front door” to the federal government by building new digital services and enhancing existing ones.

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December 8, 2015

Using emoji for knowledge sharing

By Melody Kramer

Our coworkers are very, very good at documenting the things they learn in Slack, our chat program, because it’s part of their daily workflow. So I tried an experiment: I asked my 18F coworkers to tag messages that every new 18F employee should know with the :evergreen_tree: emoji.

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December 7, 2015

What exactly do we even do all day?

By Zac Cohn

We've always been open about our code, but we decided to experiment with being open with our project management as well. We've opened up the Trello board for a project we're working on with the Environmental Protection Agency to the public, and the results have been fantastic.

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December 3, 2015

The power of mindset: Normative’s Matthew Milan

By Kate Garklavs

Matthew Milan, founder of and design leader at software design firm Normative, visited 18F’s main office to share his insights into the importance of the shared mindset and how your team can develop its own. Here are some of his takeaways.

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December 3, 2015

The EPA's new Environmental Digital Services marketplace

By Chris Cairns

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is working on ways to contract with high-quality digital service vendors, which is why they just released a Request for Information (RFI) for creating an Environmental Digital Services marketplace.

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