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Making Critical Government Information More Resilient
on June 4, 2020
A roundup of steps that federal agencies, and other government entities, can take right now to improve the resilience of their websites and serve information more efficiently to the people that need it
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A token of our affection - A field guide to USWDS 2
on April 21, 2020
We recently worked with the cloud.gov team to update their public site, cloud.gov, to United States Web Design System 2. The USWDS provided concepts we were able to use to translate designs into code a lot faster and deliver higher fidelity results once we understood how to use them.
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Forms Resource for Federalist Users
on February 18, 2020
Need to put a form on a government website? Don’t want to do all the paperwork to buy an expensive CMS? Consider Federalist!
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How Federalist and USWDS 2.0 helps agencies become compliant
on June 20, 2019
Two month ago the U.S. Web Design System 2.0 (USWDS) launched exciting new features including improved accessibility and flexible layouts. This is great news for content editors and website managers. In today’s post, we'd like to show you how you, your team, or your agency can get started with USWDS 2.0 using Federalist.
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4 benefits to using the full TTS technology stack
on March 27, 2018
When Performance.gov re-launched on February 12, it became one of hopefully many websites to use the full suite of the Technology Transformation Services’ (TTS) products and services, from hosting to design.
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A new home for the federal plain language community
on February 22, 2018
The Plain Language Action and Information Network (PLAIN) is one of the longest-standing champions for great content and user experience in government. A small team from 18F worked closely with DigitalGov and PLAIN to redesign plainlanguage.gov, making it more modern and usable.
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FICAM partners with Federalist on new federal identity playbooks
on September 5, 2017
The General Services Administration has developed digital versions of its Federal Identity, Credential and Access Management Roadmap and associated implementation guidance and put them online with the adoption of 18F’s Federalist platform.
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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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Federalist is out of beta and open for business
on June 1, 2017
If you're a program manager or a federal web developer you've probably been given a seemingly simple task: Create a basic website as part of a new initiative at your agency. The hardest part is often not crafting the content or designing the prototype, but getting the security and privacy compliance in order to launch and maintain the actual website’s compliance status. For that work, you might have to hire a contractor or put extra strain on your agency's web team. It shouldn't be that way.
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To get things done, you need great, secure tools
on February 27, 2017
To folks new to government, one of the most surprising differences between our work and work in the private sector are the barriers in accessing commercially available software, and commercially available Software as a Service (SaaS) in particular. There are many good reasons for these barriers but digital teams need great tools to get work done and compliance requires tradeoffs associated with time to initial delivery and accommodation of constraints that are different from the private sector.
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cloud.gov is now FedRAMP Authorized for use by federal agencies
on February 2, 2017
We’re delighted to announce that cloud.gov is now FedRAMP Authorized, which enables agencies to quickly transition their web-based services to efficient and easy-to-use cloud hosting. FedRAMP Authorized status marks completion of a comprehensive security and compliance assessment that enables federal agencies to start using cloud.gov with significantly reduced effort. cloud.gov is a government-customized hosting platform that takes care of technical infrastructure and security compliance requirements.
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Vendors and government strengthen partnership at Technology Industry Day
on September 19, 2016
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.
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[Long Bobolink]*: Automating and engineering a better government
on September 12, 2016
[Long Bobolink]*'s career has taken him from The University of Virginia to Intel before landing at 18F. Here, he has worked on cloud.gov and our diversity guild. His advice for people thinking about joining us: Do it.
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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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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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cloud.gov is full steam ahead on its FedRAMP assessment process
on July 18, 2016
Here at 18F on the cloud.gov team, we’re working toward getting cloud.gov assessed as FedRAMP compliant, with lots of interesting progress — so here’s an update, including our FedRAMP Ready status!
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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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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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Compliance Masonry: Building a risk management platform, brick by brick
on April 15, 2016
We’re trying to change how we approach the development of system security plans. Our goal is to create a system that allows system custodians, security operations staff, and executives to actively interact, update, and generate assurance reports with searchable content and testable security controls to satisfy any type of risk management framework. The current prototype is called Compliance Masonry.
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How we share a visual style across multiple sites
on March 30, 2016
In developing a redesign for cloud.gov, we needed a technical solution to coding the visual style that would scale to multiple sites with separate codebases without requiring us to copy code. Our solution is our “shared style library”, a library of CSS, JavaScript, images, and fonts that can be distributed to multiple codebases to create a shared visual style.
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Answering common questions about cloud.gov
on November 13, 2015
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.
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To always be shipping, you need a shipyard
on October 9, 2015
We’ve developed cloud.gov, a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), to tackle core infrastructure issues and enable our small development teams to improve the delivery of 18F products.
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This is how we start a new project from scratch at 18F
on October 6, 2015
We built the first iteration of Federalist in a matter of months. Today, we’re lifting the curtain and looking at what went into building the platform, so you can get a sense of what it looks like when 18F starts a project from scratch.
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New Federalist platform lets agencies quickly launch websites
on September 15, 2015
18F’s new Federalist platform is a suite of tools designed to make it faster for government agencies to build websites that are secure, responsive, and accessible.
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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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Layering innovation
on May 8, 2015
At 18F, we're changing the way government thinks about software, all the way to provisioning and deployment. To do that, we implemented an open source platform as a service for our developers. Here’s a look at how we created it.
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