18F Blog

Delivering on GSA's mission to expand opportunities for small business, we're hosting 18F Demo Day, Friday, May 9 at 9:00 a.m. Attendees from across the Federal Government and the small business and tech communities will get a behind-the-scenes look at our projects that are currently underway.

Easy access to detailed tracking of processes has become more and more popular. Whether using Amazon.com, UPS, Uber or United Airlines, people expect instant feedback. They want to immediately see the status of a process upon which they depend.

One of the important changes occurring across the federal government is the role of open source for non-code projects - using an open, iterative model of collaboration inherited from the coding community for all kinds of new purposes. Want to see a great example of this in action? In recent years, as more and more agencies offer public APIs, some have included a developer terms of service (TOS).

GitHub for Government did their very first AMA (Ask Me Anything) last week with Philadelphia's Chief Data Officer, Mark Headd. After some prodding by GitHub's Head Bureaucat, Ben Balter, 18F decided to use this new avenue to do some Q and A.

Today we're announcing our first product launch: FBOpen, a set of open-source tools to help small businesses search for opportunities to work with the U.S. government.