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18F Checks In With the DAWSON Project at the U.S. Tax Court
on April 25, 2023
The United States Tax Court is an independent federal court that settles disputes between taxpayers and the Internal Revenue Service. Since the 1980s, the Court has used a modified commercial software product to manage its operations. In December 2020, the Court introduced DAWSON, a modern open-source case management system developed with assistance from an industry partner and 18F. DAWSON streamlined Court operations and changed the way the public interacts with the Court.
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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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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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Improving the way the U.S. Tax Court engages with the public
on June 15, 2021
The United States Tax Court is an independent federal court that provides a forum for settling disputes between taxpayers and the Internal Revenue Service. After 30 years, the Court shifted the way it manages Court operations — here’s how 18F and the Court worked together to improve the public’s experience.
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Ask 18F - How can I best advocate for the addition of open-source tools?
on February 6, 2019
Ask 18F is an advice column that answers questions sent in by federal employees. In this edition, two of our enginners share how to best advocate for the addition of open-source tools in the analytics space.
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Modular contracting and working in the open
on October 25, 2018
Working in the open is a key component of building trust between governments and vendor partners. Read about how the State of Alaska is using openness and code sharing to foster greater trust between government project teams and vendor teams as part of a large legacy system overhaul.
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The case for open source software
on July 12, 2018
Software is everywhere at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Much of their software portfolio is open source. They began releasing software in the 1990s — long before the Federal Source Code Policy required government institutions to make their code available to each other and to release at least 20 percent to the public.
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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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How reusable is open source software?
on October 23, 2017
You can't reuse open source code that was developed to be specific to another org's business process, but we try to make components that will bootstrap development so you can focus on building an application that is tailored to your unique business process.
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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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Fractal and Federalist join the U.S. Web Design Standards
on June 6, 2017
We've added two powerful, new tools to the U.S. Web Design Standards development workflow. Fractal is a development, testing, and documentation tool, and Federalist is an 18F hosting platform that makes it easy to generate previews and simplify our process.
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One agency’s investments in open source mean others benefit
on March 15, 2017
One of the advantages to working across government is that we often have opportunities to share insights from other projects, repurpose code, and connect otherwise disjointed efforts. This happens in direct work with our partners, but also on our blog and in our GitHub repository. Our code, guides, and other work are all free for other government agencies and the public to use for their benefit (and we love when people do).
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U.S. Web Design Standards releases version 1.0
on March 13, 2017
The U.S. Web Design Standards are a library of design guidelines and code to help government developers quickly create trustworthy, accessible, and consistent digital government services. Last week, we announced the 1.0 release of the Standards, a milestone that signals the Standards are a stable, trustworthy resource for government designers and developers.
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Open source collaboration across agencies to improve HTTPS deployment
on January 6, 2017
Cameron Dixon at the Department of Homeland Security writes for 18F: To facilitate secure connections for citizens, immigrants, and other users, the Department of Homeland Security began delivering 'HTTPS Reports' directly to federal agencies. We open-sourced the tool we scan with, in collaboration with our colleagues at 18F.
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Charting the future of the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards
on December 22, 2016
As part of the latest release of the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards, we updated our design principles to better represent the evolving goals of this project. This update shows how we’re growing our open source community, focusing on experimenting with more complex components and maturing the Standards to be more mobile-focused.
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Lowering the risk of experimentation with open source code
on December 13, 2016
In September, Singapore launched the govBuy Marketplace, adapted from the Technology Transformation Service’s (TTS) Micro-Purchase Marketplace. Both sites are an auction platform designed to connect government teams to small businesses ready to solve small technical problems using open source code. The code that powers both platforms is also open source.
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Curate the best thinking available
on November 30, 2016
The Federal Source Code Policy, which was signed this year, requires federal agencies to inventory their custom software and make the inventory available for consumption and display by code.gov (among other things). The most pressing work in building code.gov was defining a software metadata schema — a way for agencies to format the details of the software they’ve built.
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code.gov is the next milestone in federal open source code
on November 7, 2016
Last week, U.S. Chief Information Officer Tony Scott announced the launch of code.gov, another important milestone in the federal government’s adoption of open source code. The new site provides access to more than 50 open source projects from 13 federal agencies.
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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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Facts about publishing open source code in government
on August 8, 2016
We’ve put together a list of facts and references that will help you build the case for open source development in your team or agency and bust myths about using public code repositories. This post is based on our experiences at the federal level, but we hope it’s helpful for anyone working in government.
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Emanuel Feld talks about his visualization of government GitHub organizations
on June 16, 2016
What does the global government open source community look like? That’s the question that Emanuel Feld, a civic technologist in Washington DC, wanted to answer when he created a visualization showing how government repos on GitHub are connected and interrelated.
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7 projects that state and local governments can reuse
on April 13, 2016
We’re starting to see state and local governments adapt or use 18F products or tools. Nothing could make us happier. Here are seven projects that would work particularly well at any level of government.
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Take our code: 34 reusable projects from 18F
on April 6, 2016
We encourage you to adapt 18F open source projects for your work and personal purposes, whether you’re a fellow federal employee or outside government. We’ve put together a list of some 18F repositories that might be especially useful to you.
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Three teams using the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards talk about their experiences
on April 5, 2016
In the five months since we launched the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards over a dozen websites have used components of the Draft Standards on their sites. Recently, we talked to three federal web designers about their experiences using the Draft Standards.
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A visit to the National Earthquake Information Center’s open source team
on April 4, 2016
I visited the Earthquakes team at their office on the Colorado School of Mines campus in Golden, CO, to learn about this open source team’s role in public service.
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Micro-purchase auctions round 2: What we learned
on January 15, 2016
The auctions have closed, the bids are in, the winners are off coding, and some already have been paid. Let’s look at some early lessons from our latest round of micro-purchase auctions.
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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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An open source government is a faster, more efficient government
on December 9, 2015
Regulation 479 is the first Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) regulation on the eRegulations platform. This collaboration is an excellent example of how open source development helps 18F deliver valuable services to our clients and the American public.
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Early lessons from the micro-purchase experiment
on November 6, 2015
Well, we sure didn’t expect this. But the winning bid for the first iteration of the 18F micro-purchase experiment was $1. And on Wednesday, the winner delivered a solution that passed our acceptance criteria.
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Announcing the criteria for 18F's first micro-purchase contract
on October 26, 2015
Today, we're beginning our micro-purchase experiment. Here are the details of what we are looking for and our acceptance criteria for the final submission.
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Open Source Micro-purchasing: An experiment in federal acquisition
on October 13, 2015
In the next few weeks, we're going to use our micro-purchase authority to run an experiment to contract for open source contributions to our active projects.
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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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Introducing the U.S. Web Design Standards
on September 28, 2015
The U.S. Web Design Standards is the U.S. government’s very own set of common UI components and visual styles for websites. It’s a resource designed to make things easier for government designers and developers, while raising the bar on what the American people can expect from their digital experiences.
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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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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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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: 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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The dat team talks data Streams
on April 23, 2015
Max Ogden and Mathias Buus Madsen are visiting 18F today to talk about dat, an open source project for versioning and sharing datasets. This new piece of software is part of their effort to build “automated, reproducible data pipelines that sync.
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GovTechHack: hacking for civic improvement
on April 2, 2015
On a recent breezy San Francisco evening, groups of developers, designers, marketing folks, and others convened for GovTechHack — a hackathon for civic good. The event’s premise was simple: To bring together people interested in improving the accessibility and transparency of federal digital resources for a two-day work session.
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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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An open source tool for easier database testing
on January 13, 2015
18F is dedicated to spreading modern software techniques like rigorous automated testing throughout the federal government; we want to showcase how solid testing enables rapid, high-quality development. When the product is based on a large relational database, this poses a dilemma: the full production dataset is too unwieldy to duplicate to the test and development environments.
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Going to .Gov college
on December 15, 2014
Last week, a number of teammates coordinated to put on three DigitalGov University courses that covered a range of topics, from culture change and open source to the latest in API trends.
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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 use more open source in your next federal IT acquisition
on November 26, 2014
The history of open source software is a record of steadily turning tremendously expensive custom-built solutions into freely available infrastructure that you can simply take for granted. What once were astoundingly sophisticated, expensive human endeavors have become open source tools you can drop into place in your project on a whim.
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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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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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Packaging up API usability testing for agency reuse
on May 19, 2014
Over the past year, a GSA collaboration has seen a project that offers API usability testing to federal agencies go from the pilot stage to a regular, robust series. Already, 13 agencies and programs have participated, and several more participate with every monthly session that passes. The best examples from across the government have made clear that one of the most important tasks of API producers is to regularly engage their developer community and listen to what they have to say. But just encouraging agencies to do this only goes so far.
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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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