5 ms·
Yup. I run Federalist at 18F and absolutely love the work, the challenge and colleagues. We do everything in the open, so feel free to follow our work here: ht
by eddietejeda 7y ago
Yup. I run Federalist at 18F and absolutely love the work, the challenge and colleagues.
We do everything in the open, so feel free to follow our work here: https://github.com/18F/federalist https://github.com/18F/federalist
We also implement the USWDS, which you can follow here: https://github.com/18F/federalist-uswds-jekyll https://github.com/18F/federalist-uswds-jekyll
Let me know if you have any questions!
- milquetoastaf 7y agoAre y'all hiring :D
- siavosh 7y agoCurious to hear if your group is still well supported budget wise?
- eddietejeda 7y agoAlthough we are part of the government, we operate as a business unit that must pay for itself to exist. To do this, we have to charge other agencies for our services. My group is "cost-recoverable," meaning, that we are longer losing money and can reinvest back into the product. You will notice our Github activity picked up recently and even more significant changes are coming soon. So, I'd say we are in the best shape we've ever been.
- bredren 7y agoCan you comment on what organizations are your biggest customers? Are you concerned about austerity measures / cutbacks affecting customer budgets?
- freehunter 7y ago>Are you concerned about austerity measures / cutbacks affecting customer budgets? Isn't every business or organization concerned about various economic forces affecting their customer budgets?
- bredren 7y agoYes, I meant to imply but I meant specifically in light of the current presidential administration and its posture toward government spending.
- User23 7y agoThe current administration is running a trillion dollar annual deficit. How much more should the public sector be spending?
- User23 7y agoThe ones that have congressional appropriations funding them aren’t.
- adamstac 7y agoEddie is this something you think would be interesting to talk about on The Changelog ~> https://changelog.com/podcast https://changelog.com/podcast We've talked about 18F with Hillary Hartley and Aidan Feldman in the past here ~> https://changelog.com/podcast/230 https://changelog.com/podcast/230 Get in touch at editors@changelog.com if you're interested!
- frogpelt 7y agoDo you (18f) have any success with redesigning internal government sites, those that require smart cards to access? Some of those are the worst.
- yoz 7y agoI was at 18F for almost 4 years. In that time, many of the projects I worked on were internally-facing. The US Government runs thousands of internally-facing websites and web applications. Many of them are entirely internal to single agencies, others are for inter-agency collaboration. Many of them require PIV or CAC cards for auth. And yes, many of them - whether card-authenticated or not - are utterly horrific. This is a big part of why the USWDS project was created. 18F is tiny, and there's no way it could address even 1% of .gov by itself. Fortunately, there are many people all across government who want to improve UX on sites and apps. USWDS is a good starter kit that significantly reduces the cost of such projects for everyone, not just 18F.
- donjo 7y ago^ what Yoz said (Hi Yoz!). Also within the last 6 months login.gov added support for PIV/CAC cards so while that product only handles the sign on experience, there is some hope for internal sites improving across the board. The tools exist at least.
- vesinisa 7y agoI must applaud your legislators for their foresight when they wrote the federal copyright charter. All works by. U.S. federal employees are in public domain, forming one of the planet's largest bodies of free online resources. The cultural impact of this collection is considerable also globally. In my country, all tax-funded government works are copyrighted. It's an ongoing battle to make each department release their works under a free license, and massive bodies of government-owned digitized cultural works sadly remain accessible only to those who pay for them.
- dclowd9901 7y agoApplaud us when getting FOIA requests responded to doesn’t require retaining lawyers.
- codetrotter 7y agoWe should always demand more from our governments. But we should also celebrate them for doing good. The politicians and government workers are people too, and while different people have different motivations I know that I am not alone in valuing praise from others highly. If all someone hears is complaints, I think they are probably more likely to burn out. I don’t have any source to back this claim, but it’s how I think it is.
- brooksgarrett 7y agoNot data but a strong anecdote to support your assertion: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/04/08/linux-mint-sobering-update-developer-struggles-community/#5b29666b2c13 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/04/08/linux...
- shaki-dora 7y agoIndeed! If people just assume you’re corrupt, incompetent, lazy, etc: why even try?
- dclowd9901 7y agoI have very high standards, but expecting public information to be public wouldn’t even be meeting those. It would be meeting one of my most basic standards. To reject and fight FOIA requests takes _effort_, more so than simply complying with them. So no, I will not applaud shit. Our government needs to get past “basically good” before I praise them for frosting like this. But feel free to embrace your feel good powwow approach. It’s done us so well so far.
- cmroanirgo 7y agoI was very pleasantly surprised by USWDS, so great work to everyone involved!
- phkahler 7y ago>> Let me know if you have any questions! If this is meant for web sites, I have a question and I ask this on HN a lot. Why does the government need to provide ANY fonts? I have a real problem with websites pushing their own fonts on users. I don't think it's their place. Users should select their preferred font in their own browser. Why would a US government site feel the need to use particular fonts? If this is for publishing in .pdf format I can understand. If it's for web, I just don't get it.
- motivated_gear 7y agoI would argue that a font is a part of an organization's brand. I think publishers like Airbnb and google have built around Cereal and roboto respectively.
- sanderjd 7y agoBecause ~no users curate their fonts, and making your site look better for the ~all users who don't curate their own fonts is the better more pragmatic choice by such a large margin that it isn't really worth much thought. Does this negatively affect your experience? Can't you override fonts if you want to? Edit: note, I'm not the person the question was directed at, and have no connection to the federalist project at all.
- fanf2 7y agoWeb fonts are very slow
- admax88q 7y agoOn the list of things that make most sites slow. Web fonts is pretty low. Moh tajns if shitty JavaScript is a much bigger problem.
- earthboundkid 7y agoIf you use link rel preload and font-display: optional, it's fine.
- 7y ago
- apeace 7y agoI clicked on a couple of the example sites and they appeared to be down. Any idea what's up? https://cio.gov https://cio.gov https://performance.gov/ https://performance.gov/
- _kst_ 7y agoBoth were up for me when I tried them just now (12 minutes after your comment).
- paul7986 7y agoCool I used the USWDS styleguide for a govt site I designed and coded in 2017. The USWDS had just been released.
- antpls 7y agoHello, are your web analytics also publicly available ? Th EU has http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/services/analytics/ http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/services/analytics/ but I recently discovered that I cannot access any data as a citizen. Legally, I'm convinced this data should be public domain.
- marksomnian 7y agohttps://analytics.usa.gov https://analytics.usa.gov
- andrei_says_ 7y agoGitHub for content management? How do you approach training? Asking because I think this approach rocks but have a hard time selling it internally.