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The Technology Transformation Service (TTS) is already absorbing the first-mover risk of introducing modern tools and techniques, but we know that only with the help of industry will this transformation be able to spread across the federal government. As we all bring agile methodologies, human-centered design, and modular design to the government, the opportunity to improve federal digital services is immense.

Over the past year, members of our distributed team have given talks in over 30 locations about how we’re changing government digital services. Topics have ranged from how we work to how we help the government build and buy software to how people can join the 18F team.

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.

Four weeks ago, we announced cloud.gov, a new platform that will enable small federal teams to rapidly develop and deploy web services with best-practice, production-level security and scalability. Currently, we’re running a small pilot program to prepare to open up cloud.gov to all federal agencies. In the meantime, we’d like to lay out some more details about the project and answer some common questions.

18F uses HTTPS for everything we make, and the U.S. government is in the process of transitioning to HTTPS everywhere. As part of this effort, we've recently partnered with DigitalGov University to produce a two-video series introducing the why's and how's of HTTPS.

In this video from the recent moveForward(100); event, Eric Maland of USDS explains the new improvements to the healthcare.gov application system, and how his team of eight developers helped save taxpayers tens of millions of dollars per year.

When Nepal was hit with a devastating earthquake on April 25, the folks at MapGive and others in the OpenStreetMap community sprang into action, organizing volunteer mappers and coordinating with mapping teams on the ground in Kathmandu.

See the power of open data and open source software in this presentation about analytics.usa.gov from 18F’s Leah Bannon and Charles Worthington of the U.S. Digital Service.