18F Blog

What if we told you that most catastrophic digital security vulnerabilities had one common denominator? One overriding contributor to root causes? Would you believe that one factor is also the biggest impediment to great design and software? That one thing? Complexity.

Natalie Kurz, a content strategist at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, recently spoke at 18F about some best practices for creating and promoting digestible, user-friendly content.

During Sunshine Week, we wrote about our progress on the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, or EITI, an international coalition organized here by the U.S. Department of the Interior and a multi-stakeholder group that includes representatives from nonprofits, academia, industry and local governments. Since March, the 18F team has worked with the USEITI team to process research on the current state of the project as well as the next steps for the U.S. as a candidate country for the global initiative.

As the 2016 presidential election heats up, here at 18F we’ve been working with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to make campaign finance data more accessible to the public. Today, we launched betaFEC, the first piece in a complete redesign of the FEC’s online presence. We were excited to work on a project that allowed us to delve into intricate campaign finance data, plain language, and the FEC’s first API.

Today, we're beginning our micro-purchase experiment. Here are the details of what we are looking for and our acceptance criteria for the final submission.