18F Blog

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.

On Friday, author and designer Dan Brown gave a talk at 18F. “Stop fighting, start designing,” centered around the design process and inherent conflict therein.

I recently spent time helping with one of our internal frustrations — how members of 18F track how we spend our time. Ultimately, we opted to try rolling our own simple solution using Django: Tock.