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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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Avoiding cloudfall: A systematic approach to cloud migration
on June 22, 2015
18F has been working on reducing the costs of entry to the cloud and thinking about good practices for cloud migration. One good practice is to adopt a scaled approach to cloud migration to avoid cloudfall.
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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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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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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.
