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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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Building a user-centered data strategy
on April 1, 2021
18F can help agencies with the process of developing an effective data strategy. Our principles of user-centered design, agile, and iterative delivery can increase your agencies’ chance for success in using data more effectively.
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The 18F Public Benefits Portfolio reflects on the last year
on March 31, 2021
Pairing our deepening domain knowledge of the unique nuances of benefits administration and delivery across programs and levels of government with our core expertise in modern technology and digital service delivery, 18F’s Public Benefits Portfolio team helped empower our partners to take some important leaps forward to rise to the critical challenges of the current moment, and we’re thrilled to highlight some of their achievements from this past year.
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A dashboard for privacy offices
on December 15, 2020
Through work funded by 10x, a team from 18F investigated how technology can help busy privacy offices manage your PII, and make their work more accessible and understandable for the public.
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The Key Role of Product Owners in Federated Data Projects
on November 24, 2020
Dedicated product owners — meaning those that are empowered, well-resourced, and committed to developing cross-agency projects on a permanent basis — can bridge disparate resources and help federated data projects succeed.
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Saving time and improving data quality for the National School Lunch & Breakfast Program
on April 23, 2020
In February 2020, pilot states reported back on their experience implementing and using a new data validation service during the fall of 2019. They agreed that it had significantly improved the data collection and submission process for their teams, citing time savings, fewer errors returned, greater ability to plan ahead, and lower stress.
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Becoming a product manager
on November 21, 2019
If you had asked me two years ago what a product manager is, I wouldn’t have known. And, yet, today, that is one of my titles. Along the way, I have been lucky to receive guidance and coaching from experienced product managers at the General Services Administration’s 18F.
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The U.S. Data Federation wants to make it easier to collect, combine, and exchange data across government
on March 5, 2019
The U.S. Data Federation Project is an initiative of the GSA Technology Transformation Services 10x program, which seeks to address the need for knowledge sharing, repeatable processes, and reusable tools for federated data efforts.
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Implementing rules without a rules engine
on October 9, 2018
If you’re building a rules-based system, don’t assume that you need a separate business rules engine product. Rules can be implemented more easily and with less overhead by cross-functional teams working to describe the rules and policy directly in code using a general purpose programming language like Python, Ruby, etc.
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ETL: Extract, Transform, Learn
on August 9, 2018
Providing government data to the public almost always requires building a data processing pipeline between its place of origin and the systems that will serve it. Data must be copied, transferred between digital storage formats, reshaped to meet the needs of reporting systems, groomed for readability, and cleansed for accuracy.
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Ask 18F — A new advice column for federal employees
on February 28, 2018
We are launching a new series called Ask 18F – an advice column that answers questions sent in by federal employees. Our technical experts hope to dispel myths and ease fears about building or buying technology in government. We aim to give you suggested resources, questions to ask your team and lastly, a good starting off point to tackle the problem you wish to solve.
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Getting prepared to prototype
on January 30, 2018
In product development, we often use prototypes to understand user needs and reduce risk. Prototypes are a great way to test out ideas or approaches before you actually commit to building anything, but governments are not always set up to develop and use prototypes efficiently before building digital services.
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[Spellbinding Hoverfly]* Model civil servant
on December 12, 2017
In the course of our engagements, we’ve had many amazing partners who have been practicing similar innovative techniques long before 18F existed, but usually in isolation. Today, we’re highlighting one of those amazing partners: [Spellbinding Hoverfly]*, at the Bureau of Fiscal Service in the Department of the Treasury.
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18F and federal laboratories work together to bring better data to businesses
on October 5, 2017
Working with 18F helped the Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer create the largest collection of federal laboratory data and technology resources available online.
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Opening the nation’s crime data
on September 7, 2017
For more than eight decades, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has collected nationwide crime data under the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program. While the data has always been publicly available via static reports, the first release of the Crime Data Explorer makes it easier than ever for anyone to access and use the data.
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TTS projects forward Open Government Partnership principles
on December 15, 2016
The U.S. Open Government National Action Plans promote the Open Government Partnership’s principles of transparency, facilitating access to government services for the public, and citizen engagement. 18F has worked with several agencies to advance the these goals through projects like DATA Act, eRegulations, USEITI, College Scorecard, and the Public Participation Playbook.
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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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DATA Act prototype: Simplicity is key
on August 29, 2016
To ensure that agencies could focus on the important work of joining their internal systems without unnecessary technology distractions, we (the 18F and Treasury prototype team) sought to deliver the simplest possible interface that would accept agency data using the simplest possible format for that data.
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Exciting additions to analytics.usa.gov
on June 17, 2016
We’ve expanded analytics.usa.gov to include 15(!) more agency-specific dashboard pages. We now offer agency-specific analytics data pages for a total of 25 major federal agencies, and each one is accessible from the dropdown menu at the top of the site.
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Prototype early, prototype often: A lesson from the DATA Act
on June 14, 2016
The DATA Act is a “tremendous undertaking …[to] standardize how federal agencies report their spending data.” It has the potential to provide unprecedented insight into how the federal government spends money, and it comes with a statutory deadline. Any delay in implementation is a delay in cost savings and transparency, so we’re trying to help the government deliver on the promise of the DATA Act in a timely manner.
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Open data democratizes innovation
on June 2, 2016
Thanks to the President’s Executive Order requiring that agencies make data open, we are democratizing access to data. Open data has empowered citizens to track trends and make informed personal decisions. And increasingly, American citizens are using government data to drive action and solve problems in their communities.
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What is an API?
on April 22, 2016
An API is like a grocery store, helping you get bananas without having to plant a banana tree.
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Interesting things we learned from examining traffic patterns on analytics.usa.gov
on March 28, 2016
Ten federal agencies now have public dashboards and datasets for their web traffic on analytics.usa.gov. The dashboards show insights into how the public interacts with specific agency websites.
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Treasury and the DATA Act: Full of sunshine
on March 15, 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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analytics.usa.gov: Now with agency-specific dashboards
on February 18, 2016
We’ve added agency-specific dashboards to analytics.usa.gov! Starting today, you’ll see a dropdown from the main analytics.usa.gov page that allows you to view the same dashboard, but filtered for websites that are administered by one of 10 specific agencies.
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Tips for adapting analytics.usa.gov from Tennessee, Boulder, and Philadelphia
on January 6, 2016
The city of Philadelphia, the city of Boulder, and the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation have all adapted analytics.usa.gov for their own use. We recently talked to them about how they adapted the platform and what advice they’d have for others who'd like to do the same.
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What’s in the first U.S. Extractives Industries Transparency Initiative report
on December 16, 2015
Just a few months ago we wrote about the next phase of the United States Extractives Industry Transparency Initiative (USEITI), one of our oldest projects with the lofty goal of educating and informing public debate around natural resources produced on public land. This week, the U.S. Department of the Interior released the first report from the United States, a major step toward becoming fully compliant with the global EITI standard.
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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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A look at complex data in USEITI
on November 30, 2015
We've been working with the Office of Natural Resource Revenues on implementing the global Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) standard, which includes all kinds of data. One new data point we have this year is the federal production number: The amount of a given resource produced on federal lands.
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Automating easy government decisions with machine learning
on November 18, 2015
Machine learning is a subfield of computer science that focuses on the problem of learning from data. We think there’s a big opportunity to make government more efficient by using the massive paper trail that government agencies have been creating over the decades as datasets for machine learning algorithms.
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USEITI: What we learned and where we’re headed
on November 2, 2015
During Sunshine Week, we wrote about our progress on the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, or EITI, an international coalition organized here by the U.S. Department of the Interior and a multi-stakeholder group that includes representatives from nonprofits, academia, industry and local governments. Since March, the 18F team has worked with the USEITI team to process research on the current state of the project as well as the next steps for the U.S. as a candidate country for the global initiative.
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Welcome to betaFEC: campaign finance for everyone
on October 29, 2015
As the 2016 presidential election heats up, here at 18F we’ve been working with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to make campaign finance data more accessible to the public. Today, we launched betaFEC, the first piece in a complete redesign of the FEC’s online presence. We were excited to work on a project that allowed us to delve into intricate campaign finance data, plain language, and the FEC’s first API.
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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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Behind the scenes: Building a new College Scorecard with students
on September 14, 2015
How we worked with the Department of Education on new steps to help students, parents and advisers make better college choices, including a new College Scorecard, comprehensive and updated data on higher education institutions, and customized tools using this new data.
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67 million more Federal Election Commission records at your fingertips
on July 15, 2015
The OpenFEC API added a filings endpoint as well as itemized receipt and disbursement data. This is the first major update to the API: The records we’re adding today are the meat and potatoes of campaign finance. You can see in detail where a campaign’s money comes from and where they spend their money.
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Introducing the Federal Election Commission’s first API
on July 8, 2015
Today marks the launch of the FEC’s first API. With that API, searching for candidates and committees will be easier and more interactive. Information is organized around concepts like candidates, which are more welcoming than navigating buckets of information based on forms.
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How DATA Act implementation is opening up federal spending
on June 9, 2015
In May 2014, President Obama signed the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA Act) into law. Once implemented, the DATA Act will make it easier to understand how the federal government spends money.
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Video: What happens when you collect .gov-wide analytics
on May 29, 2015
See the power of open data and open source software in this presentation about analytics.usa.gov
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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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How we built analytics.usa.gov
on March 19, 2015
The U.S. federal government now has a public dashboard and dataset for its web traffic, at analytics.usa.gov. 18F worked with the Digital Analytics Program, the U.S. Digital Service, and the White House to build and host the dashboard. Read on to learn about how the dashboard works, the engineering choices we made, and the open source work we produced along the way.
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A complete list of .gov domains
on December 18, 2014
We're happy to say that the .gov registry is now releasing the entire set of 5,300 .gov domains, including those outside of the federal executive branch.
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A new look at the Freedom of Information Act
on September 4, 2014
As demand for information continues to grow, it is important to continue iterating the ways we refine the FOIA request process. Our effort is one of a number of commitments towards creating a more open, transparent government. We will explore how to supplement the work that has already been done by creating tools to improve the online FOIA requests process by designing for the user.
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Creating an open FEC
on August 21, 2014
A few weeks ago, FEC and 18F started to explore how campaign finance information can be better presented to the public. Over the past few weeks, we’ve begun learning all we can about the FEC, the process by which it collects and shares data, and how individuals outside of FEC use that data on a regular basis to gain insights into the workings of our democracy.
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