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Tech talks with One OHS
on January 25, 2022
Building cross-system interoperability is long-term work, but the tech talks became an early step in establishing shared understandings and contexts for OHS.
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Building a collaborative culture: How 18F works
on April 1, 2020
We actively work to help our teammates grow. We want everyone to become better at the work we do, and we want to model that for our partners.All of this requires some key skills: communication, agility, and openness.
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A conversation about static and dynamic websites
on July 11, 2016
Our blog uses Jekyll, a static file generator with a basic templating system, as the backend software. Deploying our blog posts this way has simplified our publishing process.
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Building better by building together with the Federal Election Commission
on June 7, 2016
How do you work iteratively and in the open in government? How do you transform an agency’s digital presence with agile and user-centered design? We’ve learned a lot about this as we’ve worked alongside our partners at the Federal Election Commission (FEC) on beta.fec.gov, and we want to share some of those lessons here.
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A sestina on sunsetting content
on May 23, 2016
Sunsetting can be contentious in government. We manage websites for the public, which feels like managing content for everyone’s needs. When you have to think about everyone, that makes it a lot more complicated to delete things.
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Content debt: What it is, where to find it, and how to prevent it in the first place
on May 19, 2016
Like technical debt, a failure to plan for content-related debt can cause major headaches down the road. In this post, I list some potential sources of content-related debt, list ways to identify it, and then share strategies for preventing it in the first place.
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A guide to the 18F Writing Lab
on April 28, 2016
The guide is designed to equip 18F staff with the information they need to quickly and easily request writing and editing help from the Lab, and also to provide our Lab editors with guidance on editing styles and workflows so we can provide a smooth experience for staff who request the Lab’s help.
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The teams, they are a changin’
on April 18, 2016
To truly harness the power of agile practices, you need a stable team. But people leave under normal circumstances for a variety of reasons. While recognizing the need for stable teams, there are things our team does and should do to be resilient in the face of change.
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New guide provides tools for product leads
on March 31, 2016
To help our product managers, newcomers and veterans alike, wear the many hats that their jobs require, we’ve developed the 18F Product Guide. The guide will help get our team on the same page and provide a resource to our newcomers.
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Tips for capturing the best data from user interviews
on February 9, 2016
User interviews are, at a minimum, an opportunity for you to ask your intended audience about their expectations, what their needs are and to get direct feedback on the work you’ve done so far or on what you plan to do. But an interview is only as good as the data you get out of it.
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Lending a helping editorial hand: the 18F Writing Lab
on January 22, 2016
The Writing Lab is a virtual writing center where anyone at 18F can get personalized writing and editing help from members of the content and outreach teams.
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What we can learn from the Interior's social feeds
on January 21, 2016
One of my favorite projects is the U.S. Department of the Interior's work on social media. I recently asked Rebecca Matulka, the senior digital media strategist for Interior what she’s learned while running an online community that helps Interior achieve its larger strategic goals.
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Hacking inclusion: How we customized a bot to gently correct people who use the word 'guys'
on January 12, 2016
We want to build a diverse and inclusive workplace where people use more inclusive language so we recently customized Slackbot's autoresponses to respond automatically with different phrases if someone uses the words 'guys' or 'guyz' in an 18F chat room.
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Turning learning up to 11: Knowledge sharing
on January 5, 2016
The internal knowledge-sharing initiatives we’re working on are also of immediate benefit to other organizations, and will maximize our impact on government IT beyond product delivery.
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Turning learning up to 11: Transparent internal operations
on January 4, 2016
In the second post in this series on how transparency, autonomy, and collaboration produce organizational culture change, I describe a few of the initiatives we’ve undertaken to increase transparency into 18F’s internal operations.
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Turning learning up to 11
on December 30, 2015
The feature that distinguishes high-performing organizations across all industries is their ability to facilitate knowledge sharing across the entire organization. This is the first post in a series about the tools and processes we use at 18F to facilitate knowledges sharing.
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We asked everyone at 18F to reflect on the most meaningful project they worked on this year
on December 23, 2015
2015 was a big year for 18F. We almost doubled in size, worked with 28 different agency partners, and released products ranging from Design Method Cards to cloud.gov. Internally, we improved onboarding and our documentation by releasing guides on topics as diverse as content, accessibility, and creating good open source projects. To mark the end of the year, we reached out to everyone at 18F and asked them to reflect on a meaningful project they worked on this year.
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Plain language for the win: betaFEC’s new content design
on December 17, 2015
The Federal Election Commission (FEC) has been working since the 1970s to clarify the rules for raising and spending money in federal elections, and today we’re thrilled to announce the first major content launch of betaFEC: a guide to registration and reporting that makes intricate information easier to understand.
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How a bot named Dolores Landingham transformed 18F’s onboarding
on December 15, 2015
Over the past few months, we’ve released several products — including checklists, a handbook, and classes — to help new hires orient themselves to 18F. By far the most successful onboarding item we’ve released is a Slack bot that sends scheduled messages to new hires so that they don’t experience information overload during their first week.
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How we test 18f.gsa.gov
on December 11, 2015
As our blog got more complicated, we started making mistakes that were hard to catch before publishing. So we came up with a way to catch many of those errors, before they end up in your browser.
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Using emoji for knowledge sharing
on December 8, 2015
Our coworkers are very, very good at documenting the things they learn in Slack, our chat program, because it’s part of their daily workflow. So I tried an experiment: I asked my 18F coworkers to tag messages that every new 18F employee should know with the :evergreen_tree: emoji.
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How we dramatically improved 18F’s onboarding process in 3 months
on December 1, 2015
Over the past three months, we’ve released several products that help new hires acclimate to our organization. In this blog post, we’ll detail what we did and why it works really well.
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How we use a lean approach to product design
on November 20, 2015
Here at 18F, several product teams (including CALC, Discovery, and EITI) have been experimenting with a lean product design approach to building software, often called “lean UX.” In a nutshell, it is a set of ideas about design and project management that help us focus not just on what we build, but on the outcomes our tools enable.
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In conversation with CFPB’s Natalie Kurz
on November 6, 2015
Last month, content strategist and UX designer Natalie Kurz from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau presented at 18F. Prior to her presentation, we had the chance to chat with Kurz via email about her experience working with different types of content, her predictions for the field, and the collaborative approaches she recommends.
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Content strategy for all: insights from CFPB’s Natalie Kurz
on November 3, 2015
Natalie Kurz, a content strategist at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, recently spoke at 18F about some best practices for creating and promoting digestible, user-friendly content.
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18F’s best practices for making distributed teams work
on October 15, 2015
18F employees live all over the country, which means it's normal for the members of a project team to be spread across multiple cities. Because our teams are distributed, we've developed certain strategies for working well as a collaborative operation.
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What's in a name: Understanding and using government acronyms
on October 14, 2015
We have an acronyms section in our Content Guide, a resource we heartily recommend. Acronyms and abbreviations also have a ton of associated history and nuance, which we’re shedding light on here, hopefully to encourage other authors and agencies to think carefully about how they use them in digital tools.
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You shared, we listened — updates to the 18F Content Guide
on October 8, 2015
After we launched the 18F Content Guide, we received all kinds of suggestions for updates and improvements. Here's a sampling of some of the improvements we've made recently based on your suggestions.
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18F’s style guide for open source project documentation
on July 29, 2015
The Open Source Style Guide is a comprehensive handbook for writing clear, accessible, and user-friendly documentation so that your open source code repositories are accessible both internally and externally.
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The 18F content guide: working toward cleaner, more accessible communication
on July 6, 2015
We’re proud to announce the release of our 18F Content Guide, a comprehensive handbook to help content creators on our team (and, we hope, elsewhere) create more direct, accessible, and compelling written works.
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Building a better welcome wagon
on June 15, 2015
As our team expands to meet federal digital needs, we've learned to appreciate documentation for its ability to turn new hires into self-sufficient contributors quickly, with minimal disruption to the organization.
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Giving back to open source: Everybody wins
on June 3, 2015
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.
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18F Guides
on May 28, 2015
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.
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Tocking time
on May 21, 2015
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.
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18F: a great place to write
on April 29, 2015
We collaborate on much of what we do at 18F, from the way we work on code to the way we write our blog. Though we have a small editorial team, the blog — and our writing process — extends ownership to the entire 18F team.
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Making Twitter images accessible
on March 24, 2015
To make our tweets more accessible, 18F has started responding to our Tweets containing images, with another tweet explaining what the image shows.
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How to use GitHub and the terminal: a guide
on March 3, 2015
At 18F we hire people from many different backgrounds and each new employee brings a different level of comfort with the specific tools we use on our various projects. The team that runs the 18F website recently started writing down the tools and processes that we use to update the blog and the code that runs the site. We're sharing that with you today.
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Three 18F products that will help your workplace
on February 17, 2015
I’ve worked at 18F for exactly six days. During those six days, I learned about a few products that I wish I’d known about while at my previous job. These products would not only have saved me hours of work (itself a bonus), but they also would have fostered long-term collaboration.
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The 18F Hub
on December 23, 2014
The Hub is a Jekyll-based documentation platform that aims to help development teams organize and easily share their information, and to enable easy exploration of the connections between team members, projects, and skill sets. It also serves as a lightweight tool that other teams can experiment with and deploy with a minimum of setup.
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Snippets
on December 17, 2014
18F has begun collecting and publishing team member "snippets," short lists summarizing what you worked on the previous week and what you plan to work on during the upcoming week. Team members submit their snippets each Monday, and they are published internally for all to peruse. Snippets foster transparency and team cohesion, spark productive interactions, and can be cultivated right away using tools already at-hand.
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Taking control of our website with Jekyll and webhooks
on November 17, 2014
How we moved our website to Jekyll, left Tumblr behind, and set up automatic deployment with webhooks.
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