18F Blog

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.

The Presidential Innovation Fellows program is now accepting applications from creative, energetic policy hackers, entrepreneurs, user experience experts, designers, front-end developers, back-end developers, system architecture wizards, data wranglers, and more to serve their tours of duty to radically improve the delivery of government digital services.