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A revised and expanded guide for de-risking government technology projects
on September 12, 2024
New content on vendor management and a streamlined structure make one of 18F's most popular guides even more useful for government staff.
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Working with Oracle databases in open-source projects
on July 17, 2024
Follow this step-by-step tutorial to gain access to data locked inside proprietary Oracle databases, so you can use it in your open-source project.
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18F's engineering craft practices at 10
on July 9, 2024
18F engineering has grown and matured as an organization over time. We recently celebrated our 10th anniversary delivering better government services to the public. To support continual investment in our practices, we are renewing our commitment to regularly publishing what we learn, and creating a new engineering leadership role at 18F.
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18F practices in action (spoiler: this stuff works)
on April 3, 2024
Do 18F software development principles really work? We reflected on a recent project to see how well 18F recommendations aligned with what we actually did.
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18F at ten
on March 19, 2024
We’re celebrating all the ways we continue to realize our founding vision: bringing technologists into government, launching shared digital services, and helping partner agencies build user-centered technology.
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Customer experience: beyond surveys
on March 5, 2024
Want to measure customer experience? Surveys aren’t the only way! Consider these guiding questions to help your team select an approach based on what you want to learn.
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Gathering feedback with customer panels
on February 1, 2024
Ever wondered how the federal government, cities, towns and other groups get a .gov domain for their sites? The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) manages all these domains across the web. Learn how we helped CISA build a customer panel to gather feedback from current customers as part of our partnership in building a new website for the .gov registrar.
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Sharing artifacts and outputs from research
on December 5, 2023
Have you conducted user research and are now wondering what artifacts or outputs you can share and with whom? Here's a guide.
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A website refresh in 3 months
on September 21, 2023
A website redesign doesn't have to be a big project. By approaching it as a process of iteration, we launched a refreshed site in the span of several weeks.
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The four operating levels of 18F projects
on June 13, 2023
At 18F, we partner with government agencies to help them deliver new or modernized digital services. In our experience, we have identified four operating levels that best support successful project outcomes.
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“Hi” from the 18F design chapter
on May 2, 2023
Designing technology-enabled public services requires deep expertise in how different elements of the experience come together (or don’t!). The 18F design chapter comprises four discipline-specific cohorts — service design, user experience (UX) design, product design, and content strategy.
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Am I doing it right? A check up for agile teams
on March 23, 2023
Even on the best teams, things need to be monitored and adjusted. If you are doing this for the first time, it can be even harder. In this article, I share some signals of what success looks like and what to do if you are stuck in one of the many common pitfalls.
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We asked our design team: what did you learn in 2022, and what are you looking forward to in 2023?
on February 13, 2023
We asked our design team what they learned in 2022, and what they are looking forward to in 2023. Here’s what some of our team members had to say.
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The 18F engineering sandwich for cloud based web apps
on September 6, 2022
We often talk about 18F Engineering as a technology shop, but that's too broad. There are very few technology choices we actually make at the project level. When we build, we usually build open-source cloud-based web applications. We combine a limited set of technologies to make our applications. To explain this, we'll use the metaphor of a sandwich shop.
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We asked our coworkers: What have you learned from other 18F designers?
on January 21, 2022
We asked 18F designers what they've learned from fellow designers while working together. Here's what they said.
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The weekly ship: what it is, why it's useful, and how to create your own
on October 21, 2021
The weekly ship has been a staple of 18F projects for years. It is a way to engage partners, inform teammates, and reflect on our work.
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A day in the life of an 18F Engineer
on September 30, 2021
According to Census estimates, about 41 million people speak Spanish in the United States. At 18F, we envision a country whose government consistently offers digital services that instill pride and trust. Our bilingual engineer, Edwin Torres, shares what a working day is like in our organization.
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A day in the life - Ingeniero en 18F
on September 21, 2021
Según estimados del Censo, cerca de 41 millones de personas hablan español en Estados Unidos. En 18F imaginamos un país cuyo Gobierno ofrezca servicios digitales consistentes y confiables para todos sus usuarios. Nuestro ingeniero, Edwin Torres nos habla de su día de trabajo y la importancia de tener empleados hispanohablantes.
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The TTS Handbook: A 21st-century approach to internal documentation
on July 27, 2021
In this post, we introduce the Technology Transformation Services Handbook: an open, crowd-sourced, accessible, and living resource that aims to provide the information our team needs to do their work.
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Building capacities within a government agency to build and support a new case management system: part 2
on June 17, 2021
This is part two in a two-part series with our partner team at the U.S. Tax Court about their experiences building their new, open source case management system, DAWSON. For this post, we talked to Mike Marcotte, Technical Lead on the project.
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Building capacities within a government agency to build and support a new case management system: part 1
on June 16, 2021
This is part one in a two-part series with our partner team at the U.S. Tax Court about their experiences building their new, open source case management system, DAWSON. For this post, we chatted with Jessica Marine, Product Owner and Deputy Clerk of the Court, Case Services Officer.
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We asked our coworkers: Why did you join 18F?
on May 11, 2021
We asked our team: “why did you join 18F?” and got all kinds of inspiring answers.
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Why simplicity? Choosing a web architecture
on April 5, 2021
If you have ever led or managed a web project, you know that coordinating a team of software engineers is hard work! We hope this blog post can help you understand the concepts behind choosing a web application architecture, so that you can steer your software towards simplicity — even if you don’t have direct software engineering experience.
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Technical problems are not the hardest ones to solve
on March 4, 2021
18F consulting software engineers play a pivotal role in helping our partners understand and solve their technical problems, and in doing so help them understand what problems cannot be solved with technology.
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Path Analysis: Technical Assessments toward more durable, usable systems
on February 2, 2021
What does 18F do during a technical assessment? Our approach to a technical assessment is designed to ensure that everyone fully understands the problem and has come to the best solution — not necessarily the first one that came to mind.
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Building distributed teams
on January 12, 2021
At 18F, we’ve seen that remote work can make teams happier, more productive, and more inclusive. Organizing ourselves in a remote-first way has improved our morale and allowed us to recruit and retain talent from all across the country. But building great distributed teams takes real work.
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18F and TTS Office of Acquisition award first assisted acquisition
on December 17, 2020
The Administration for Children & Families’ Office of Family Assistance, TTS, and the vendor community worked together to improve the TANF Data Reporting System (TDRS) to make it easier and faster for States, Tribes, and Territories to support low income families
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A federal guide to de-risk government technology projects
on September 9, 2020
Announcing the federal field guide to de-risk government technology
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10 weeks improving government through technology
on August 13, 2020
This summer TTS welcomed Abdul Tahlil as a Coding it Forward Civic Digital fellow. Abdul joined the TTS Outreach team to work on the 18F site. We’ve invited Abdul to tell us a bit more about the fellowship program and his experience as an engineer on the team.
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Building trust in a public health crisis
on June 23, 2020
Lately, the 18F content team has been thinking about how to communicate well in a crisis—providing clear, understandable content is especially important. Content strategy practices that focus on the needs of the user are essential to earning the trust of the public. Here, we will explain how to embody those qualities on the web in user-centered ways.
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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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Six years improving the experience of government
on March 19, 2020
We’re celebrating another birthday at 18F, and we thought we’d take the opportunity to reflect on how our organization has grown and progressed in the last year
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An Acquisition Retrospective
on March 18, 2020
The Centers of Excellence and 18F worked together with the General Services Administration’s Region 1 Assisted Acquisition Services to create the Discovery BPA, which allows the Centers of Excellence to quickly staff the industry side of the their teams embedded at agency partners.
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Areas for growth part 2: mixed methods
on February 27, 2020
Mixed methods is an approach in the social sciences in which you gather both quantitative and qualitative data in an effort to make more informed and integrated interpretations based on the combined strengths of both types of data.
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Areas for growth part 1: Continual appreciative dialogue
on February 20, 2020
Continual Appreciative Dialogue (CAD) is the practice of expressing recurring praise or gratitude to a teammate or collaborator in conversation and throughout a working relationship. The practice of CAD is special because it is uncommon.
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Even with a design system, you still need a designer
on February 6, 2020
The US Web Design System gives flexibility so teams can build the right solution for users, but there are still plenty of design decisions that teams need to make to be successful.
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How 18F and PIF work together in agencies
on May 16, 2019
Two teams working together to help agencies become more effective at meeting the needs of citizens.
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Why we love modular contracting
on April 9, 2019
Modular contracting is an acquisition strategy that 18F uses with many of our partners and our internal programs. So, why do we love modular contracting and how does it make procurement better?
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18F’s four favorite projects of 2018
on March 22, 2019
To continue our birthday celebrations, we’re saluting those projects and partners that inspired our team to do their best to improve the user experience of government. We asked staff from acquisitions to strategy to share what project they loved working on during the past year.
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Happy 5th birthday, 18F
on March 19, 2019
It’s been five years since we launched 18F, and we’ve grown a lot since that day — in size, in focus, and in impact. We wanted to celebrate our fifth birthday with a look back at what we’ve accomplished, what we’ve learned along the way, and where we’re headed next.
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Six ways we’ve recently improved TTS’s Design Research Guild
on March 7, 2019
A few months ago, the TTS’s Design Research Guild started brainstorming ways to better position itself for success. In this post, we’ll share the six ways we’ve recently worked to improve the guild.
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Product management at 18F, part 4 - 10x
on February 14, 2019
10x projects let anyone in government pitch an idea that could have a massive impact on the public. So how does 10x go about developing these ideas? Each pitch requires a lead investigator who will need to develop an understanding of the idea and make recommendations. Although it’s not limited to product managers, the tools of product management can come in handy when creating a process to determine if the idea is worth pursuing.
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Product management at 18F, part 3 - Products and Platforms
on December 20, 2018
While our consulting work serves the needs of a particular customer, managing one of our products means we are responsible for a shared service used by many of our partners. Managing one of the products and platforms means thinking beyond any individual customer. This work requires that we constantly evaluate market needs, ensure the product matches those needs, and support the business side of product management.
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Product management at 18F, part 2 - Acquisitions
on December 11, 2018
In the previous post, we wrote about how product management works in Path Analysis and Experiment & Iterate phases. In this post, we’ll discuss how 18F product managers support our partner agencies who are procuring the services of industry contractors to help achieve their mission.
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Product management at 18F, part 1 - New engagements
on December 4, 2018
At 18F, we partner with federal agencies to improve the user experience of government. We bring our product management skills to bear during these engagements to build digital services in line with our partners’ missions. When working with an agency, identifying the right problem focus on is often the first challenge. That’s why we have Path Analyses (PA): short engagements to survey the landscape and align everyone on a path forward.
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Taking the ATO process from 6 months to 30 days
on July 19, 2018
Security compliance is a major factor in launching a software system in the federal government. The Authority To Operate compliance process for systems within our division of GSA was taking more than six months for every system. With the new process, we have cleared the backlog and reduced the turnaround time to under a month.
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What agencies have to say about working in the open
on May 24, 2018
18F has long espoused the benefits of using open source technologies and more broadly, the value of working in the open. We wanted to hear from other agencies about how open source has worked for them and what the future looks like for them. So, we asked a few of our partner agencies to talk about their experience.
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Aiming for obsolescence: Lessons from an 18F product transition
on May 1, 2018
Four years into 18F’s work, transition is a topic of frequent conversation among our team. Every organization and every project is different. At the same time, every transition offers lessons that can be applied to the next.
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So, you’re a Product Owner...
on April 17, 2018
At 18F, a primary goal we have when working with agency partners to build or buy great digital products is to make sure the agency partner has full ownership over the product and its outcomes by the time we leave the project. One of the ways we build this sense of ownership is by identifying a Product Owner early on.
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3 ways to manage research projects remotely
on September 27, 2017
At 18F, we have employees across the U.S. Over time, we’ve cultivated our best practices for distributed teams and design methods. Yet, doing research as a remote team is still really hard. Here are some things that we’ve found make it easier.
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Automated scanning for sensitive information in the development lifecycle
on September 26, 2017
Often when developing open source software, and especially software that relies on outside services, you’ll find that you have to manage sensitive information. While there are a large number of things that can be considered sensitive, open source developers often deal with sensitive items such as API tokens, passwords, and private keys that are required for the system to function. Here's how we approached keeping this information safe.
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Walking the talk: what went into the Method Cards’ tune up
on September 21, 2017
Recently, 18F released a new version of the Method Cards, a collection of tools that offer simple, “how-to” descriptions of research and design methods with a special emphasis on the use of those methods in government work. With this new release, the Method Cards have become easier to read and understand, as well as easier to print and circulate.
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The Dark Standup
on January 19, 2017
In September, our Operations team was authorized for a limited amount of overtime during the fiscal year crunch. The team needed the extra hours, but like many others in America, it always feels like we need 50 hours a week to get everything done. Once we were in the fiscal new year, we decided to determine how accurate our perception of not having enough time to get everything done truly was. So the team did something interesting.
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What 18F is thankful for this Thanksgiving
on November 25, 2016
Like all federal employees, we don't work on Thanksgiving. We do work on the day after, though, and this year we thought we'd pause to take a moment and reflect. Here are a few things that we're thankful for, what brings meaning to our lives, and what brings us to work every day.
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Kanban for government
on August 31, 2016
Some months ago, 18F started playing with kanban as a way to manage and improve our processes. For the 18F Agreements team, adopting kanban has caused a dramatic positive change in how they manage their work.
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What happens when the whole team joins user interviews
on August 16, 2016
The CALC team is an agile team of four — six if you count the Scrummaster and the Product Owner — building a simple means to load price data into the original CALC tool. They’re an Agile team, which means everybody pitches in on everything to some degree, and here, in their own words, is some reflection on what happened when they all scrubbed in on the discovery phase.
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Patterns for managing multi-tenant cloud environments
on August 10, 2016
When 18F started, deploying government services into a public cloud was still fairly uncommon. However, everything 18F has built has been deployed into Amazon Web Services (AWS), including cloud.gov. Over that time, our AWS account has grown in size and complexity and we needed a new approach to make sure it remains manageable.
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Jacob Harris: From big data journalism to micro-purchase platforms
on August 2, 2016
Jacob Harris joined 18F in May of 2015 after nine years working as a developer at The New York Times. He currently works on the Micro-purchase Platform, which enables vendors to place bids on opportunities to deliver open source code that costs $3,500 or less.
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Live streamed demos for exponential transparency and information sharing
on July 29, 2016
This spring, the eRegulations Notice & Comment team began building out a new feature set for the platform. To demo the work as we iterated on it, we faced a challenge of finding a way to do connect frequently with the dozens of interested parties. We settled on live streaming our demos through a video website that is accessible by most government agencies, doesn’t require extraneous plugins to operate, allows you to easily stream, but also automatically creates a viewable file afterwards at the same URL.
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Bret Mogilefsky: Finding the big good in cloud.gov
on July 28, 2016
Bret Mogilefsky spent most of his career working in the game development industry. He came to the government seeking the best way he could have a big impact and do big good.
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Build empathy with stakeholder interviews, part 2: Conversation
on July 22, 2016
In the first post of this series, I covered what stakeholder interviews are, why they’re valuable, and how to prepare for them. In this second post, I’ll cover how to actually run the interviews as well as some tips for synthesizing and socializing what you learn.
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Strategies for starting your own writing lab
on July 19, 2016
Interested in spinning up your own Writing Lab? Use these tips as your starting point.
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Elaine Kamlley: A developer committed to diversity
on July 14, 2016
All throughout the summer, we’ll be profiling members across the 18F team. We’re starting with Elaine Kamlley, who is both a front-end developer and a member of our Outreach Team
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When a micro-purchase doesn’t work out, we try to learn from it
on July 7, 2016
Two months ago, the 18F acquisitions team ran a public micro-purchase auction to find a vendor to develop a small new feature for 18F's cloud.gov, and for the first time after several successful micro-purchases for other products, the contracted vendor didn’t deliver the code on time. This was very interesting to us we’re early in the life of the micro-purchase platform, and we believe that failure is a great way to learn. In the spirit of experimentation and sharing our lessons, here’s how we went about analyzing this, and here’s what we learned.
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6 ways a writing lab will help your organization
on June 30, 2016
Wondering if a writing lab might be right for your organization? Reviewing the benefits 18F has seen from our Writing Lab might help you figure out if starting your own is the way to go.
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Build empathy with stakeholder interviews, part 1: Preparation
on June 20, 2016
In this post, I'll cover what stakeholder interviews are, why they’re valuable, and how to prepare for them. In the second post, I’ll cover how to actually run the interviews as well as some tips for synthesizing and integrating the results into the team’s shared understanding.
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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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Why we’re moving 18f.gsa.gov to Federalist
on May 18, 2016
We want 18f.gsa.gov to be an exemplar of what 18F can do for partner agencies. One way to do that is to host it the way we’d host a similar site for a partner agency, and that means moving to Federalist.
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Introducing 18F’s new visual identity
on May 12, 2016
If you’re a frequent visitor to our website, you may have noticed a few updates — most notably, that we’ve got a new logo. For the past few months, members of our visual design team have been crafting and refining our new visual identity, and we’re thrilled to introduce it.
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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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Making a distributed design team work
on April 27, 2016
There are now over 30 of us on the Experience Design team. Often, designers on the same project are not in the same location. Here are some techniques we’ve developed to help us work effectively when we aren’t in the same room or even the same times zone.
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Lean on me: Asking for help on the content team
on April 25, 2016
Our content squad is made of folks with a wide range of backgrounds and skills — we put this to good use by regularly asking each other for help with projects. Here’s a look into some of our recent collaboration.
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A clear audience makes for a good blog post
on April 20, 2016
The most important advice I give 18F staff while they’re working on a blog post is to define their audience as clearly and as narrowly as possible. This focus has helped us overcome numerous hurdles to publishing quality blog posts, and it’s also the part of our new Blogging Guide that I’m most excited about.
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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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Making more consistent decisions with design principles: A new 18F guide
on April 8, 2016
Design principles are concise, specific guidelines for generating and then evaluating ideas and artifacts. We had trouble finding detailed instructions for making and using design principles online. So we decided to write our own.
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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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We asked over 100 of our coworkers: What have you loved working on?
on March 23, 2016
One of the best parts of working at 18F is the focus on meaningful, mission-driven projects. But which projects? We asked everyone across the organization to tell us what they've most enjoyed working on. Here are their responses.
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We asked over 100 of our coworkers: What was your path to 18F?
on March 22, 2016
People have joined 18F from a variety of different backgrounds. We asked them to tell us how they got to 18F, and over 100 of them did.
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We asked over 100 of our coworkers: Why did you join 18F?
on March 21, 2016
Why did people make the decision to join 18F? We asked people on every team to reflect on why they came here.
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How user archetypes informed the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards
on March 18, 2016
To celebrate Sunshine Week, we’re highlighting some groundbreaking open government work by the Department of the Treasury, one of 18F’s partner agencies.
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Bringing iterative development to our Talent Team
on February 9, 2016
Over the past year, the Talent Team has worked hard to improve the 18F job application process. We’ve worked hard, but also differently. We shifted our view of talent acquisition from a support function to a product that we deliver, and one that demands the lean and agile philosophies that are the 18F way of life.
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How user story estimation helps my team deliver value
on January 25, 2016
At 18F, we believe that employing agile practices is the most effective way to build digital services. User story estimation is one of the most useful agile tools, and in this post, I’ll talk about how and why my team has been using it.
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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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18F's New Year's resolution: Be even more open
on January 7, 2016
We've been thinking a lot lately about our role within the open source community, and it's our 2016 resolution to increase the number of non-employee contributors to our projects, including: contributors with little previous experience with open source, and contributors to documentation, bug filing, and other non-coding work.
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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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Is your project using “agilefall”?
on December 29, 2015
At 18F, we’ve spent a lot of time working with federal agencies and coaching them through the transition to agile, but on first blush it’s not always easy to tell who’s really adopted agile versus those who just say they’re agile because they know they’re supposed to.
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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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U.K. digital service visits U.S. to begin series of exchanges
on December 22, 2015
Across the pond, the motto of the United Kingdom's Government Digital Service (GDS) is “the strategy is delivery.” Over here, we say “delivery is the strategy,” but we’re both focused on the same thing: Fostering positive change across government by shipping quality digital solutions.
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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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What exactly do we even do all day?
on December 7, 2015
We've always been open about our code, but we decided to experiment with being open with our project management as well. We've opened up the Trello board for a project we're working on with the Environmental Protection Agency to the public, and the results have been fantastic.
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The power of mindset: Normative’s Matthew Milan
on December 3, 2015
Matthew Milan, founder of and design leader at software design firm Normative, visited 18F’s main office to share his insights into the importance of the shared mindset and how your team can develop its own. Here are some of his takeaways.
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analytics.usa.gov: New features and more data
on December 2, 2015
We’ve recently added a few new features to analytics.usa.gov: location data, download data, and expanded downloadable files.
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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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New playbook details what it's like to work with 18F Delivery
on November 19, 2015
If you or your agency have thought about working with 18F but are unsure of how we work with our partners, we have a new set of guidelines to help you out. The 18F Delivery Partnership Playbook is specifically targeted at federal offices interested in working with 18F to build digital services.
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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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Every Kid in a Park: Why we can’t stop smiling
on October 21, 2015
Our projects are iterative, which means we keep working on them after they launch. In keeping with that practice, we’ve kept a close eye on everykidinapark.gov, which went live September 1. We’re excited to share a few of our improvements and updates with you today.
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Five factors for building a successful government-wide digital analytics program
on October 20, 2015
Launched just three years ago, the Digital Analytics Program (DAP) continues to drive the 2012 Digital Government Strategy’s mission to improve the citizen experience by streamlining the collection and analysis of digital analytics data on a federal government-wide scale. Today, 45 agencies — including all CFO Act agencies — have implemented the common code across more than 4,000 public-facing websites, counting 1.5 BILLION pageviews each month.
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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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Building a better government design team
on October 2, 2015
Building a high-performing design team is tough under the best of circumstances. Add in governmental regulations, a distributed workforce, and rapid growth of the parent organization, and the process is even tougher.
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New citizenship resources demystify the naturalization process
on September 21, 2015
For many people, September conjures up happy memories of heading back to school, new backpack and supplies in tow. For new and aspiring citizens, September has additional significance: It’s when the federal government celebrates Constitution Week, a weeklong observance commemorating the adoption of the U.S. Constitution.
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How a two-day sprint moved an agency twenty years forward
on September 9, 2015
At 18F Consulting, we experiment with ways to empower agencies to build cost-efficient, excellent digital solutions. Recently we partnered with the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division to run a two day “Design/Dev Agile Sprint” to help them modernize their Field Operations Handbook.
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How to design a government site for kids
on September 3, 2015
Every Kid in a Park gives U.S. fourth graders free access to all federal lands and water for a full year. Here at 18F, we were proud to develop the site in partnership with the U.S. Department of Interior and other federal land management agencies.
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Introducing 18F Design Methods
on August 10, 2015
We’re thrilled to introduce the beta deck of 18F Design Methods, a collection of research and design practices that we use to better understand and serve the users of our products.
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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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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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Moving from GitHub Pages to 18F Pages
on May 14, 2015
As part of 18F's effort to generate helpful documentation for all digital service teams, we have launched https://pages.18f.gov/, aka “18F Pages,” an ever-growing site that contains guides, best practices, and more.
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On culture change: A code of conduct
on May 12, 2015
It has become a standard practice in the software industry to create a “code of conduct” for conferences and events. By creating our own Code of Conduct, we are defining the kind of environment we seek to create.
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Pair programming: Why two heads are better than one
on May 4, 2015
At 18F, we frequently use pair programming, a technique where two developers work together on one screen. We asked two developers at 18F how they pair program and why they find it useful.
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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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The intersection of art and technology
on April 28, 2015
Earlier this month, I went to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City for the first time. I was there to see a special exhibit featuring the pop singer Bjӧrk, who is currently presenting a retrospective of her life’s work as a musician, artist and technologist. The retrospective spans back from her early beginnings as a childhood folk singer in Iceland all the way through to her most current album release.
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Agile development’s secret weapon: transparency
on April 24, 2015
18F Consulting recommends agile development for several reasons, including agile’s emphasis on user needs, continuous integration, and rapid adaptation to changed circumstances. But there is another important reason we recommend agile: its focus on transparency.
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Hackathons: not just for folks who code
on April 21, 2015
A few members of the 18F team recently published an excellent guide on welcoming new coders to civic hackathons. In the same vein, we’d like to offer a list of strategies for including non-technical folks in your hackathons.
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A day in the life of an 18F talent manager
on April 8, 2015
For this month's installment of our Day in the Life series, Talent Manager Jamie Albrecht shares the ins and outs of her day — and her power song.
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How to welcome new coders to a civic hackathon
on April 3, 2015
The National Day of Civic Hacking is a great time to attend — or host your first hackathon. We’ve outlined some strategies for first-time hackathon hosts to ensure new participants feel welcome, and help them maximize their contributions.
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18F discussion: Should project teams code first or design first?
on April 3, 2015
Recently, three members of our team sat down for a conversation about when teams should start coding on a project.
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Focus on accessibility
on March 31, 2015
Accessibility is central to our work here at 18F. Read more about our accessibility efforts and how you can get involved.
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One year in and looking forward
on March 20, 2015
One year ago we said, 'Hello, World' and launched not only a new team, but also the promise of a new way of working with and for the Federal Government. Here's what we've accomplished so far.
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18F by the numbers
on March 19, 2015
Today, we’re celebrating our first anniversary. We wanted to take a look at some of the numbers that have helped define 18F during our first year.
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Does 18F pass the Bechdel test for tech?
on March 17, 2015
How does the Bechdel test, originally designed for evaluating works for fiction, apply to technology projects? To pass, a function written by a woman dev must call a function written by another woman dev.
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A day in the life of an 18F content designer
on March 12, 2015
In preparation for our one-year anniversary, we at 18F are introducing a new blog feature — our Day in the Life Series. Once a month, a different team member will share the details of their typical day in the office. Up first is Kate Garklavs, Content Designer.
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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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Open source for good government
on January 16, 2015
Organizations like 18F and the U.K.’s Government Digital Service (GDS) fully embrace open source, and their combined commitment to openness and transparency is transforming the delivery of government digital services in both countries.
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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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Large scale development culture change: Google and the U.S. government
on December 11, 2014
18F exists to demonstrate how Open Source and Agile-inspired methodologies are critical to an effective, efficient, modern delivery process. However, driving adoption of these tools and practices throughout the federal government will require more than setting a good example. My recent talk at the GSA, available on YouTube, connects the dots between grassroots automated testing adoption at Google and the challenges facing similar culture change across Federal IT development.
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Great community turnout for Midas open source hack night
on December 10, 2014
The October Oopen source hack night was a huge success, both as a community event and for the positive impact on the Midas project.
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How to run your own three-sprint agile workshop
on October 21, 2014
You can’t learn agile software development from a book any more than you can learn to perform a one-handed jump shot without repeatedly tossing a basketball in the hoop. You can read a book about the basic idea, you can read a book to get started, and you can read a book about refining your technique, but in the end you have to practice.
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18F open source hack series: Midas
on October 1, 2014
18F invites designers and developers from inside and outside of government to join us for a flurry of coding and sketching. Midas is an open source project in active development by 18F, Health & Human Services (HHS) IDEA Lab and the State Department. A small cross-agency team, dedicated to launching this product to empower passionate civil servants and aspiring diplomats all over the world.
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User-centered design at 18F: a design studio for natural resource revenues
on September 25, 2014
We recently kicked off a new project with the Department of the Interior’s Office of Natural Resources Revenue (ONRR). Three weeks into the project, we decided to hold a design studio to solve the problem of how to convey complex revenue data. We needed to better understand the difference between onshore revenue (revenue from natural resources extracted from land) and offshore revenue (revenue from resources extracted from Federal offshore or the U.S. outer continental shelf) as it relates to our system. What is a design studio, you ask...
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Getting to work for the American people
on September 18, 2014
Over the last six months, 18F has embarked on a mission to transform the way the U.S. Government builds and buys digital services. We’re currently working with more than half a dozen agencies to help them deliver on their missions in a design-centric, agile, open, and data-driven way.
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The encasement strategy: on legacy systems and the importance of APIs
on September 8, 2014
In 1986 a nuclear reactor known as Chernobyl released harmful radioactivity which spread over much of the western USSR and Europe. The core of this reactor remains a glowing, ineradicable mass of deadly radioactive lava in the middle of a large Exclusion Zone unfit for human habitation.
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The contributor's guide to 18F: code for the common good
on August 12, 2014
Transparency in coding makes code more secure. Open source development is development in the light, sometimes a harsh light, that shows every blemish. At 18F we strongly believe this improves the rapidity of our coding and the quality and security of the code.
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Working in public from day one
on July 31, 2014
Open source your code from day one. Don't wait for a milestone, don't wait for it to be stable — do it from the first commit.
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18F: an open source team
on July 29, 2014
At 18F, we place a premium on developing digital tools and services in the open. This means contributing our source code back to the community, actively repurposing our code across projects, and contributing back to the open source tools we use. For a variety of reasons, we believe that doing so improves the final product we create.
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Hot off the press: 18F's API standards
on July 15, 2014
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
on June 25, 2014
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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Hacking bureaucracy: improving hiring and software deployment
on May 14, 2014
When asked what it is we do, one quick answer is, "we’re hacking bureaucracy." While it may sound provocative, it isn’t.
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A few notes on NotAlone.gov
on May 9, 2014
At the end of April, Vice President Biden, while rolling out the final report of the White House's 90-day Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault, announced the launch of NotAlone.gov, a website built by 18F and the Presidential Innovation Fellows.
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18F Demo Day
on April 28, 2014
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.
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Open source and terms of service = a better developer experience
on April 11, 2014
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).
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Ask us (almost) anything
on April 1, 2014
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.
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