18F Blog

Today, the White House's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) finalized an HTTPS-Only Standard for all publicly accessible federal websites and web services. This standard is designed to ensure a new, strong baseline of user privacy and security across U.S. government websites and APIs.

We love when we're able to contribure to open source projects from other organizations. Recently, we contributed to Bitly's open source google_auth_proxy to support our Hub and MyUSA applications, and our contribution has already helped other OAuth2 providers.

The U.S. federal government is launching a new project to monitor how it's doing at best practices on the web. A sort of health monitor for the U.S. government's websites, it's called Pulse, and you can find it at pulse.cio.gov.

See the power of open data and open source software in this presentation about analytics.usa.gov from 18F’s Leah Bannon and Charles Worthington of the U.S. Digital Service.

While there's no substitute for personal instruction and mentorship, that effort scales far more effectively when there are clear, concise materials to introduce the basics. 18F Guides aims to fill that role for our young and growing team, and we hope it may be of use to others as well.