18F Blog

Midas: a marketplace for innovation in government

By Joe Polastre , Matt Chessen, Department of State

July 16, 2014 midas open opportunities platforms

Midas is an online platform that brings to life the vision of an Innovation Toolkit for government. It's a marketplace of skill building opportunities which matches people to projects that they're passionate about. You can think of it as “Kickstarter for people's time.”

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Hot off the press: 18F's API standards

By Alan deLevie , Eric Mill

July 15, 2014 api best practices how we work

We recently released the first version of our API Standards — a set of recommendations and guidelines for API production. It is our intention that every 18F API meet these standards, to help us ensure a baseline quality and consistency across all APIs we offer now and in the future.

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Intro to APIs: Working with URLs, JSON, APIs, and Open Data — without writing any code

By Gray Brooks , Eric Mill

June 25, 2014 api best practices workshop how we work events

June 27, 2014, from 9:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. Register now. GSA’s digital teams are offering a user-friendly intro course to APIs. Regardless of your skill level, you will walk away from this lesson understanding what APIs are and how developers use them.

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Announcing the /Developer Program: a new hub for federal API creators

By Leah Bannon , Gray Brooks

May 29, 2014 education evangelism api

We recently launched our /Developer Program (pronounced "slash developer") to help federal agencies develop useful, robust APIs. The Program is a collection of educational resources, opportunities to engage the community for help and feedback, and tools that can help you build APIs — essentially an ever-growing knowledge base curated by 18F.

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Packaging up API usability testing for agency reuse

By Gray Brooks

May 19, 2014 api usability open source best practices evangelism

Over the past year, a GSA collaboration has seen a project that offers API usability testing to federal agencies go from the pilot stage to a regular, robust series. Already, 13 agencies and programs have participated, and several more participate with every monthly session that passes. The best examples from across the government have made clear that one of the most important tasks of API producers is to regularly engage their developer community and listen to what they have to say. But just encouraging agencies to do this only goes so far.

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