The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - 18F and OSS in the U.S. Federal Government (Interview)

Episode Date: November 25, 2016

From 18F — Hillary Hartley and Aidan Feldman joined the show to talk about how 18F is changing the way the federal government builds and buys digital services.

Bandwidth for ChangeLog is provided by Fastly. Learn more at Fastly.com. I'm Hillary Hartley. And I'm Aidan Feldman. And you're listening to ChangeLog. Welcome back, everyone. This is the ChangeLog, and I'm your host, Adam Stachowiak. This is episode 230, and today, Jared and I are talking to Hillary Hartley and Aiden Feldman of 18F,

talking about the way the federal government builds, buys, and uses software, digital services, things like that. A lot of fun conversation about where the 18F came from, the roles that both Hillary and Aiden play, and how pivotal they are. Interesting projects like MicroPurchase, 18F Guides, Cloud.gov, Analytics, and more. We have three sponsors today, CodeSchool, Rollbar, and GoCD from ThoughtWorks. First sponsor of the show is our friends at CodeSchool, and it's Black Friday all week long at CodeSchool, which means you get to save big. They have two offers to help you save, a six-month plan off and a full year plan for 51 off the sale starts monday november 21st and ends monday november 28th but don't wait this is a limited time offer head to codeschool.com to learn more

and now on to the show and we are back we have a fun show today jared 18f it's this is a show i think at least six months or more in the making right yeah that's right it's a show that we wanted to do for a long time and we've had people ask us specifically in ping chris mckay give us the idea for this show and when he first asked us, I was a little bit, I just didn't know who to talk to. If you go to 18F's website, you'll find that their team is like hundreds of people large. And I didn't know the best person to talk to. Thankfully, we had to give a shout out to Atul Varma, who was in Ping on a different issue. And we got to talking and realized Atul has connections at 18f perhaps he may even work there

i don't recall but atul introduced us to hillary hartley and aiden feldman and we were able to uh line up a show so hillary and aiden thanks so much for joining us on the changelog thanks for having us excited to be here i guess one more thing we should probably plug to jerry to sarah allen when we had her back on the show. Episode 157, actually. That was a while ago, but we talked to her a little bit about some of the things. It's mostly about building bridges, which is from Bridge Foundry and whatnot. But that's kind of where I was first enamored by the work being done at 18F.

Yeah, absolutely. Go check out that show. Sarah is awesome. And before we get too far into it, we just keep talking about 18F. Perhaps we should get a definition. And let's leave it to Hillary. Hillary, you are the Deputy Executive Director, which is an awesome title there at 18F. Why don't you tell us Fellowship, which is how I got involved and how Sarah Allen got involved. We were both TIFs, which is an unfortunate acronym, but we stuck with it. We were both innovation fellows in 2013. And at the end of 2013, a few things happened. There was a government shutdown.

There was also a fairly large government website that failed. And AT&F did not actually itself contribute to the rescue of healthcare.gov. But that moment kind of catalyzed a lot of things at the federal government level. And it gave a lot of us working on technology in that space kind of a common vocabulary and also a common playbook for how we were going to approach this stuff. So at the end of 2013, a bunch of presidential innovation fellows decided to stick around the General Services Administration for a little bit longer. And we created a small team at the time, which was designed essentially to work with other agencies, helping them build software and digital services. So in a nutshell, 18F is a consultancy made up of federal government employees that we are a government team inside the GSA, the General Services Administration, that works with other federal agencies. And over the last two and a

half, almost three years, we've grown from about 15 people to about 200 people. And we've worked with, I think it's something like 37 different federal agencies, helping them deliver services, but also in a consulting capacity too. So we do a lot of short-term consulting engagements now that really at the, I think at the heart of what we do is helping an agency or a program manager see their problem in a new light or see a path forward in a new way. And we either become the team that helps them build something or we help them, you know, get a project back on track either by helping them buy something or create an

RFP request for proposal, or maybe even work with an existing vendor. So that's kind of the scope of what we do with, again, at the heart of it really just being the people who are helping our, our agency partners really kind of see their technology challenges in a new way. You said the word agency, right? That's how you act internally as ATNA for an agency?

We are inside, yeah, the General Services Administration, which is a federal government agency. And then we work in partnership with the other federal government agencies. Well, the reason why I ask that question is it's common in bigger companies to have essentially what gets branded or termed the marketing team, right? But they're essentially an internal agency to the organization, and it may have many departments, many branches. And this seems like a much bigger, broader version of that that a lot of larger corporations tend to have. Is that accurate to say? Where you work for different departments and they kind of reach out to you for different things they're trying to do or new problems they're trying to solve and you help them and come alongside them to solve those problems. Yeah, I think that's definitely a fair comparison. One of the reasons we sort of

frame it as a consultancy is because we actually do operate that way. We operate as a business. So, you know, we are inside government, but we're not getting appropriations from Congress. We're not getting any money given to us. We actually charge the other agencies an hourly rate to work with us. Very similar in organizations that are like that, too. Slightly different, except they're not exchanging money, but they do tend to bill hours or at least think about time and effort and things like that. They just don't say it's an open check and have fun. Yeah.

Well, in terms of getting to know you guys a little bit, Aiden, why don't you give us a little bit of your backstory with regards to how you got involved in 18F? You are an innovation specialist, a.k.a. a developer at the organization. How did you get involved? Yeah, so I've been at 18F for just over two years. before that and never ever considered working in government until a former co-worker you know pointed it out to me and said you know this is a really cool team that you know believes really strongly in open source which is something i feel really strongly about and you know you can't really ask for a better mission so i ended up talking with a couple people on the team and yeah just kind of fell in love and so i've been there ever since i read that you're also an instructor at cornell can you tell us about that a little bit yeah so uh you know outside of my work with gsa i do some teaching

um yeah right now i'm doing a class at cornell uh kind of teaching about how large-scale systems you know work uh when you're when you're doing web development. So, you know, understanding DevOps principles and all different layers of the stack, that kind of thing. So, yeah, in general, outside of work, I do a lot a lot with people learning to code. And that's something I'm also really excited about. Very cool. Now, Hillary, we have to ask you about this because you have an awesome single word Twitter handle, Hillary, which shows that you've been around. You got that imagine being Hillary during the 2016 election probably brought to you a lot of noise. Can you tell us about what it's like to have that handle on Twitter this year? Yeah, the last year or two even.

Yeah. Twitter has not been especially usable for me. At least how I used to, you know, use it to keep in touch with friends and family, but also if I'm speaking at a conference, people talking to me, asking questions, etc. Most everything that is actually something I would want to read is completely buried in noise. It's a very nice way to say it.

You can go to search.twitter.com search for at hillary oh man see for yourself i was happy for you at first and then i realized uh all that probably goes along with that but uh right yeah it has uh it's not been especially uh fun to to use for the last 18 months or so. What about your position there at 18F? You're the deputy executive, is that right? Or director? Which one is it? Yeah, technically my title is deputy executive director.

Okay, gotcha. So it's all three of those. All of them. All of them. You must do everything. And do you have, they give you a badge? Do you get the badge with it or is it uh just my my jokes are bad today yeah i don't have a badge but i do carry a lot of

stickers with me everywhere i go nice yeah so what's what is your position what are some of the things you do um yeah i mean essentially i i helped get 18f started started when it was about, as I mentioned, about 10 fellows that sort of rolled over from our roles as innovation fellows and created this small team. And there were three of us that really kind of became the, as a couple of our co-workers called us in the early days, sort of the quote-unquote parents of the group, I've just sort of evolved into the role of not having the burden of actually running the show, but getting to help run and be an advisor in a lot of things. In the early days, I was really focused on building out our design capacity and also our communications capacity. And so kind of helped to recruit the first designers for the team, helped build a small team and then find a director for that team,

which has grown now into an amazing force of, I think, almost 40 designers and have grown a small communications team that is, I think, about five people now focused on getting the good word of 18F out into a lot of different channels and to our customers. You mentioned stickers, and I just had to recall a moment I had a week or so back. I was in Portland, staying outside of Pine State Biscuits, which is spectacular, by the way, with a few friends. And there was a lamppost there that had all of the stickers on it from bands and political movements and stuff.

And there was an AT&F sticker. It was definitely your guys's right there on the side of that lamppost. And I said, hey, I'm interviewing those people next week. AT&F does not endorse defacing city property. However. But yeah, it is really cool it was really cool to see people around with the stickers they get to some interesting places

that was awesome we have uh we have i think five people in the foiling area right now okay that's how i got there then somebody put it there yeah think probably those people are going to Pine State Biscuits because that place like I said is spectacular if you're in the area check them out this is not a paid endorsement I don't know if this is something that's interesting to you all or not but I mean the fact that we sort of talked about Portland and

Aiden is in New York and I'm in the Bay Area and about 40% of our team is in DC I mean we've been able to build this really distributed team and people working from coast to coast using video conferencing and collaboration tools. And it's pretty amazing. It's the first really remote-first team that I've ever worked on,

and it's been a pretty cool experience. That is cool, especially for a government agency to be spread out across like that. I noticed that 18F, for those curious about the name, comes from 18th and F Streets, which are in Washington, D.C., and probably the crossroads of your main headquarters. But yeah, tell us about working remotely and building a remote team and maybe even some of the tools that you guys use and that kind of stuff. Dave, do you want to talk a little bit? Sure. So, yeah, as we mentioned, we have people all over the country and not just limited and limited to cities either.

You know, we have people in Wyoming. We have people in southern Illinois. We have people all over the place. So, yeah, I've been working remotely for a few years, including, you know, before 18F. And I, yeah, I think we, you know, it takes a lot of like commitment to kind of have a remote first team. But actually, GSA, the agency we work for, you know, I think 18F does remote really well. But really, the agency has been doing remote longer than 18F has existed. So GSA is like a really, you know,-thinking telework policy and things like that.

And so I think there is more distributed work in government than maybe someone would guess just because of the sheer size of it and the fact that it has to cover the entire country. So within 18F, we are on chat all day we use we use slack very very heavily i think we have you know hundreds of members and and probably like 700 channels something like that uh we're in video we use a lot of video uh conferencing so tools like hangouts and zoom you know google box and gith for, you know, doing collaboration, uh, things like that. Those sound very, uh, I don't know what we call them typical in terms of, you know,

a technology based company these days, I guess when you think of a government, uh, organization, you think of, you know, having to use internal tools or things that are behind the time. And it sounds like y'all haven't been put into that circumstance, which is nice. Yeah, I think kind of credit to Hillary and others that have been around since the beginning. When I came in, you sort of wouldn't notice that 18F weren't an actual startup out in the private sector.

And where you really start to feel it is where in the projects and then the you know kind of bureaucracy that you have to go through for hr or other you know other you know sort of limitations and like what you can or can't talk about those kinds of things but yeah i mean 18f you know i think we strive to make it feel like a startup where you wouldn't even notice that it's different in terms of tooling culture, that kind of thing. So, Hillary, in one of your emails back to us, you'd mentioned some details around why you're an open source team and maybe even why open source is such a big deal to the government and maybe even 18F directly and then all those that hire you internally in the government to do some cool stuff. In your own words, what are some of the reasons why it's important to you? What is open

source towards the government? What influence does it have for the government? Well, really, at the end of the day, everything that public servants build, everything that we create, is actually open source, whether we call it that or not. It belongs to the people. So any work product that we create is the people's. It belongs to our country. Public domain. Yeah, public domain. I mean, so fundamentally, it's just the right thing to do.

So was GitHub a beacon of light, so to speak, for your efforts in government? I know that in 2013, you mentioned a failed site that we won't name that was sort of the impetus and reason for she named it she named it oh she didn't okay i didn't want to throw any shade you know that's all so i guess was github you know a beacon of light to be able to have a more de facto place to share this stuff and you know invite the the community, the general public to peek into or peek behind the veil of what is, like you said, it's open source. But to me, I think, OK, it's open source, but how accessible is it?

Right. Yeah. And that's a really fair question and something that I think we're getting better at, thanks to a lot of effort by Aiden and others on our team. I mean, if you look at GitHub, actually, there have been government teams using it for a number of effort by Aiden and others on our team. I mean, if you look at GitHub, actually, there have been government teams using it for a number of years now. Code.gov just launched and is pulling in repositories, and it's going to be the official place to go find government code.

But actually, if you go look at govcode.org, that's actually one of our colleagues that pulled that together before he even worked for 18F. And, you know, you can see that there are a lot of different teams and a lot of different groups and a lot of different agencies using GitHub. And so it's definitely been a tool that has acted a little bit as a forcing function for us and for others because it is so easy to use to a certain extent. And hopefully the amount of reuse and the amount of savings that we will see across the government and not just at the federal level, but also at the state and county and territory level well into the future. Hopefully we see a lot of cost savings that come from people being able to easily find and adapt tools and things that AT&f and other teams built i also feel like security is an impact

there because with so many people having the ability to look into whatever you know if it's a new feature that's being developed or you know an api or something like that like that having people be able to see into that and actually peek into it and everyone wants this country to be a good country you know obviously and then also because it's open source, other countries buy the nature of open source that other countries can adopt things we're doing. We've had Code for America on here. We've had fellows on here before. So we've talked about Gov 2.0. We've talked about open data.

We've talked about those things. So it's important to have visibility into those things. And to me, it seems like it might impact security, too. Absolutely. Yeah, we believe really strongly in open source and we are open source by default. The security angle, again, we are not the first people in government to be doing a lot of this. The Department of Defense of all places actually put out a memo in 2009, I want to say saying that uh you know security by obscurity in other words hiding the source code is not a legitimate like security protection um and in fact yeah

like you mentioned you're having having the ability for other people to audit that code and you know this goes alongside with us using open source frameworks that are already getting a lot of security eyes on them. It has a huge benefit for us security-wise and otherwise. I think coming back to GitHub too, I'm not sure if I got a direct answer if that was a beacon of light or not, but it seemed like it might have been because it seemed like maybe the creation of 18F may have been an easier sell sell so to speak, because if the general public,

as you mentioned earlier, Aiden, like that, this is the general public's pod domain code, you know, being able to actually put that into a community where it is normal to share normal, to collaborate normal, to fork normal, to send a pull request, and be in the same mix. It seems like it made the, the process of doing what you're doing around 18f so much easier yeah so i mean we are certainly very very heavy users of github and you know are sending pull requests all day and certainly receive a lot of contributions from outside you know i see github as a tool i think it is you know there's

a strong community there's a lot of people that know how to use it and therefore it makes it easier you know an easier path to contribute um but really you know the more the sort of long game for me is you know how do you encourage those contributions how do you encourage that reuse if github is the right tool which i you know i think it is right now that's what we'll use but it is really the we're not using github because it's github we're using github because it helps us right you know succeed in our mission of course let's talk about some of your guys's code on on github you have over 620 repositories that you're the source of probably plenty more with forks uh one one thing Adam asked earlier was about the accessibility and

some of that, to me, it leads to the idea around the community and what kind of open source projects they are. Aiden, I think you mentioned it's all public domain. So I assume that they're all licensed in the public domain. You can correct that if it's wrong but in terms of like what kind of projects these are with regard to community are these like it's open source so you can look at what we're doing or is it open source because it's a call to action that we want everybody to work on this what kind of open source is it yeah so there's a lot in that question um you know the first part around licensing i learned something interesting recently that um the i believe the u.s government is the only entity essentially in the united states that can waive copyright or that does not have copyright sort of automatically assigned so we before my

time uh it was sort of chosen that we'd use we 18f would use uh the creative commons public domain license creative commons zero and that is you know has special provisions to you know kind of waive copyright in other countries where possible but individuals can't actually waive copyright it's not actually a thing that you can do so uh creative commons essentially says i am trying to waive all copyrights that i can but the u.s government is actually uniquely positioned to say yep we don't have copyright it is public domain so yeah so that's one thing um in terms of contributions you know i think yeah there are lots of different you know ways to do open source you know there's a sort of throw it over the wall and in the sense of you know our code is available

here and you can look at it and you can download it but you know we really strive for you know the far end of doing all of our work in the open you know at least in terms of like code changes and and those sorts of things so you know you'll see all of our repositories have pull requests and comments and feedback and things like that from people on the team. And there's some cool benefits of if there's a question that I and the other people on my team don't know the answer to, I can phone a friend and send them a link to a pull request and they can actually comment in the same workflow that we use.

So there's some really, really nice benefits there in terms of getting input on government projects as well as anyone being able to open an issue or create a pull request, that kind of thing. Given that we do have so many public repositories, I think it's kind of overwhelming for people. So I think one thing we don't necessarily do a great job of is helping people understand, OK, I'm interested in contributing.

Where do I start? Right. Which is a good question. We'll definitely ask you towards the end of the show, because we like to give people that listen to the show waypoints, so to speak. Where can people step in to help with 18F initiatives, whether it's in repositoriesories whether it's in absolutely bidding on a feature if they're able to or whatever so yeah yeah i want to speak to one point you made there which i've just recently really enjoyed as well when you mentioned that you can you know link people directly into things and you can have them

their comments in line and we recently open sourced the code behind changelog.com and i have lots of like personal projects open source and other things but never like a project that i'm continually been working on and like have issues and you know perhaps trying to explain things to people and one thing that's really cool about having an open source now is especially when i'm looking for help on a certain thing or i have a question about some code instead of having to you know grab that code and throw it in a gist or you know a pastebin or whatever i can actually just like deep link directly into the areas of the code to show people what i'm talking about yeah and that's really it's really nice it's almost like i'm in a common api or common language to speak around, basically. Absolutely.

And just show. Instead of having to tell people, you just show them. It's like, oh, it's right there. Have a look. Really cool. Yeah, absolutely. Cool. Well, I think we're hitting up against our first break.

You guys have a lot of projects. We want to highlight some of your major ones and most successful ones. So on the other side of this break, we will talk about success stories and we will dig into some of the details around the technologies and the ideas behind some of 18F's most popular open source projects. We will be right back. roll bar puts errors in their place roll bar.com change log check them out get 90 days of the bootstrap plan totally for free i had a conversation with paul bigger the founder of circle ci and he talked deeply about how they use roll bar and how important that tool is to their developers take a listen circle ci is a continuous integration and continuous delivery platform. Our customers are the developers in an organization. Developers rely on us heavily as part of their deployment workflow. So let's assume anyone listening to

this is someone who needs to use Rollbar. Someone needs to know about this tool, needs to know about this product, needs to know how it's changed how you do business because of it. I'd like them to know how important this tool is to you. And a better question might even be, could you have done what you're doing with CircleCI without Robar's help? We operate at serious scale. And literally the first thing we do when we've created a new service is we install Robar in it. We need to have that visibility. And without that visibility, it would be impossible to run at the scale we do. And certainly with the number of people that we have. We're a relatively small team operating a major service.

And without the visibility that Rollbar gives us into our exceptions, it just wouldn't be possible. If there's people out there who ship code without Rollbar, I can only imagine the pain that they're going through. Oh, that's awesome. Thanks, Paul. I appreciate your time. So listeners, we have a special offer for you. Go to rollbar.com slash changelog, sign up, get the bootstrap plan for free for 90 days. That's 300,000 errors tracked totally for free. Give Rollbar a try today. Head over to rollbar.com slash changelog.

All right, we are back with Hillary Hartley and Aiden Feldman talking about all things 18F and open source code with the U.S. government. So we teed up before the break talking about some of your success stories, some of the projects that are on GitHub and out there to be seen and to be interacted with. Let's just talk about a few of them, starting with MicroPurchase. Who wants to give us the rundown on that project? I can give you two cents on it, which is that part of how we have expanded our work over the last couple of years was by realizing that we're only a finite number of people inside a pretty big bureaucracy. And there are a lot of people out there that can work like we do and can do amazing work.

And so we've done a number of experiments kind of in the acquisition and procurement space around helping government be a better and savvier buyer of technology. And MicroPurchase is a pretty cool example of that, where essentially what we're doing is we had the hypothesis that we could buy small chunks of code with our government credit cards that have a limit of $3,500. So the question was, could we buy code on a credit card for $3,500 or less? What that means is we have to scope tasks really well. We have to get both our people and the partner that we're actually writing the task for to kind of think concretely and discreetly about these things, which is great for us. And then it means we put this task out there in this marketplace and people reverse bid on that

task. So it starts at $3,500 and works its way down. The very first task order that we put out, actually, the winning bid was a dollar. We did not expect it, but it was sort of a great monkey wrench in the early hypothesis. It made us kind of think about the approach and it also made us realize that a lot of people are hungry for opportunities to do open source work for the government. I mean, the guy who won actually made a point to say, you know, I would have done this for free, but I had to bid a dollar. I want to help. So we've had a couple of $1 bids since then, but mostly I think the average bid, I can actually go to the website and tell you, but I think the average bid is just under $1,000. $930.

I was going to say that, Jared. Sorry, you beat me. There you go. You're looking at the insights tab. Yeah, the insights tab is really awesome. I love that. My favorite stat on there is actually the number of vendors that we've added to this ecosystem. So there are a lot of people that do work for the government.

When you want to do work for the government, you have to get qualified via this website called SAM.gov. I think it's an acronym that stands for I think it's a system of acquisition management. System for award management. Award management, yes. It's essentially where you go to get listed and verify that you're a business and that you're able to do work for the government. So we've registered 92 new small businesses, which is awesome.

These are businesses that now might do other work for the government but hadn't before. So we're really kind of widening the aperture of people and vendors and businesses that want to and can work for the government. And that's really exciting. This is so cool. I should also add that the $1 bid was maybe the first time in history that the government has been criticized for not paying enough for software. So yeah, I mean, it's, it's, I don't know, I really like this project as an example of, you know, taking this kind of unique government constraint of, you know, this magic number of $3,500 where, yeah, things get a lot more complicated over that number. And okay, how do we make that work for you know the sort of quick iterations and

working in open source that we want to yeah i can see this working quite well inside of the enterprise as well as they often have similar constraints around what you can purchase without a po or without you know going up a level to a manager and i love that this started with you know we have 3500 that we can put on a card. And so let's break up these projects so small that we can just do that, you know, however many times necessary to get it done. That's a great hack. It's also been forked by the government of Singapore. They actually took our code and they're running it.

And they're running their own micro-purchase platform now. New York City is trying as well. There's also an API extended off this too. Its current version is 0.0.1, so it's certainly early in its infancy in terms of an API. But how does the API play into micropurchase? What can people do with it? Yeah, so we use a different system internally to do sort of like purchase tracking. And so I think a lot of the API usage is, you know,

internal where we actually needed to integrate with our other systems. But, you know, a lot of our projects, and I think we'll talk about this with the other ones that come up too, you know, I think we do have a very strong commitment of opening up the data. And the best way to do that, especially where the data changes, is by having an api so yeah you know it's it's important that people can be able to audit us you know whether they're actual auditors or you know journalists or people like that and uh yeah i think there's a

lot of you know people in the civic tech community who are interested in different kinds of government data. So yeah, having an API is kind of an enabler for them on top of, you know, just the use that it has for us internally. Just to flaunt a little bit of your technical abilities, MicroPurchase is a Rails app and it proudly has a couple of badges code climate 4.0 rating and 96 test coverage so it sounds like uh you know being public has definitely made the team write good code yeah and we try to use a lot of industry standard kinds of tools like travis ci and code climate and things like that to be able to see your tests run when you when either we or an outside contributor you know contributes code and it works the same for everyone we don't need government specific tools for most of these things it's just it's just code so we should be able to use what everyone

else does that's awesome yeah so micro purchase we'll link that one up in the show notes for those interested definitely the kind of project that you could fork and set up for your company or for other uses. That's very cool that Singapore has hopped on board and New York as well. So anything else on micro-purchase besides it seems like a good idea, well executed. Anything else to say on that before we move on? I'd say just that it's part of our additional effort that isn't just around building software of actually making uh the kind of the kind of uh internal slogan is uh making procurements joyful so trying to you know make it so that working with high quality outside vendors you know we

don't want to be the one dev shop that does work for government. I think if AT&F succeeds, AT&F won't be necessary in the future. And so if we can enable good vendors to get work in the government and for the government to be able to vet that work well and scope that work well, then we'll have won. Yeah, it leads us a little bit in the cloud.gov.

What do you think, Adam? Well, cloud.gov is the platform as a service for the government. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah, tell us about that. Yeah, cloud.gov, as you said, is essentially a platform as a developer on a team inside the federal government, you are actually supposed to be familiar with a number of regulations and memoranda and all kinds of things that tell you how to be in compliance

with your code. And we added it up, and I think it's currently about 4,400 pages of compliance code, essentially, that people need to be aware of just to ship code, just to go from 0.1 to an 0.2. And so what we really are trying to do with cloud.gov is scratch our own itch. But in so doing, we are essentially enabling any government team to be able to more easily deploy their code and their services. Aiden, you want to say a little bit more? So, yeah, we started off with 18F doing a lot of our deployments on Amazon Web Services. Again,

you know, something that's very common for people to use, but found that, you know, because we have this sort of consulting setup where we're working on a lot of different projects and deploying new things all the time, we didn't have enough kind of infrastructure experience to be able to, you know know manage servers for every single one of these you know dozens of projects and spinning up new environments all the time and that kind of thing so you know cloud.gov came out of us sort of looking at the landscape and saying you know okay how can we centralize this experience a bit and not have to have a huge amount of overhead and setting up servers and renewing certificates in you know installing security patches those kinds of things how can

we centralize that so that teams can just focus on you know their actual task at hand and uh so yeah it started off as you know a project that we were using internally and you know became clear very quickly that hey there's no reason this wouldn't be useful to other government agencies who have this compliance burden and so not not only can we centralize a lot of the technology things that are needed things like access control things like the security updates etc you know by cloud.gov taking on those kind of burdens you can kind of solve for at once both from from a technical and compliance perspective. And then teams, to get through that compliance kind of hoop, it's much, much simpler because they're just focusing on the things that are specific to them.

Is this like a sustainability play? Is this platform going to be something that can sustain 18F moving forward in terms of income from other agencies? Yeah. So we have a couple sort of like different business units, we call it. So, you know, we'll do projects that are specific to agencies that we intend to hand off to them or a vendor to maintain on their behalf. And the bulk of the projects. And we also have these sort of products and platforms. So cloud.gov is, yeah, something that we plan to run indefinitely.

And that enables our other projects, but is also, yeah, it's a, you know, it's its own business line, really. It has customers and it has teams that are working on projects that HNF wasn't involved with, but they just needed somewhere to deploy that was going to be technically and compliance-wise

easy to use and make their lives easier. So CloudDeco has been a big boon for that. And it makes total sense from your team who's solving your own problem and then turning that over. Are there any alternatives aside from like an AWS? Are there any competitors in this space trying to provide platforms for specific government needs in terms of security and the regulations?

Or is this basically Greenfield? There's nobody else doing it. Well, so there's certainly other platforms as a service in the world. I think Cloud Foundry, which is the tool that we're using under the hood in cloud.gov, that is being,

it was developed originally by Pivotal and is also being used by HP and Chase and a lot of other big companies, both, you know, as a commercial offering and not some infrastructure as a service offerings, things like AWS and Azure exist. And those are certainly heavily used in government at the time.

And I believe still to this day, there is no kind of platform as a service that is what's gone through FedRAMP, what's called FedRAMP certification. So yeah, there is no platform as a service that is commercially available, or I should say available to government you know from the commercial world um i hope that i hope that changes actually because one of the benefits of using this open source platform is that

there is um a lot of platform independence you know if your app works on cloud.gov it'll work on pivotal web services or or you know yeah or these other companies that are offering Cloud Foundry. So if there's other offerings and that can save the government money, that would be great. So what is FedRAMP? Is it essentially a certification to, is it around technology services for the government that it's a stamp saying this is okay to use or what is this? Yeah, essentially. There's a stamp saying this is okay to use or what is this yeah essentially um there's a lot of nuance but yeah it is essentially a a stamp saying you know this cloud provider uh whether it's infrastructure or things like salesforce you know things like that um have gone through all

these compliance checks you know which involves a lot of security and that kind of thing so you know other agencies can kind of say, okay, we trust FedRAMP, and therefore we are able to leverage this with much lower barrier to entry than if we were doing the whole evaluation ourselves. Right, right. Because the U.S. government is very decentralized, and so each agency is kind of doing this on their own,

but FedRAMP is meant to be a sort of centralized, okay, trust us, and then you can you know do whatever additional checks that you need to but the barrier is much lower is the long-term play to have the government at large use cloud.gov to host things is that the long-term plan for this or is it simply because it seems like it was born out of your own interest to do what you needed to do to get your mission done but it has a larger ability to help the government long term yes i mean we already have you know sort of external customers you know like the environmental protection agency uh launching something that their teams are building um all this is under 18f then this This is built by 18F? But yeah, it's

not meant to be the exclusive offering. We're never going to be in a position where we mandate that people use cloud.gov. But if you have a barrier to get certified though or to get FedRAMP as you mentioned, if that's a thing, I don't know if FedRAMP is a thing, but

if you have to have that stamp then that that pool of availability is limited then you might be the easiest choice and so by definition federated or mandated yeah i mean we you know actually i am also working on making the fed ramp barrier lower so you know like the acquisitions you know we don't want to be the only game in town right we are doing a lot of this work because uh it's, you know, like the acquisitions, you know, we don't want to be the only game in town. Right. We are doing a lot of this work because it's actually, you know, a lot of ways easier to do it from within government than outside. But yeah, we don't want to exclude vendors. We, you know, I think we believe competition is good. And so if we can offer this, but also, you know, simultaneously try and lower those barriers. That's a win for

everyone. It seems like your actions have definitely backed up that sentiment in terms of micro-purchase and in terms of this idea behind making procurement a joy. One way to do that is to have more competition, you know, amongst those that you can procure from. And so that doesn't, just wanted to say that that seems like more than just lip service to me. It sounds like, Aiden, you're actually speaking out of the organization's desire for real. Absolutely. Someone kind of alluded to it a minute ago, but there's a there's a good saying that, you know, we definitely were not the first to to use. But that applies here and applies to a lot of our projects, which is essentially to make the right thing the easiest thing. And cloud.gov definitely falls into that category.

So while we will never mandate its use, we do believe that making it easy to be in compliant will encourage use. And that goes for the web standards project that we've worked on, the standards.usa.gov, encouraging folks to think about a kind of common look and feel across the government. That conversation doesn't always go the way that you want to, but if you can make the right thing to do the easiest thing to do, then you see adoption go up. So I think that CloudDuck is a great example of that. Yeah, especially with regards to your open source code. If you have other agencies that can be reusing some things that you've built, now you've already built it the way that you believe is the right way of doing it.

And it's so easy for them to do it the right way because they don't actually have to reimplement that. You have a win in terms of labor, reduced labor, and you You have a win in terms of reduced labor and you also have a win in terms of germinating the right way of doing things into these other agencies. Absolutely. And yeah, I mean, that can go for using all of cloud.gov and there's even pieces of cloud.gov. As we've built things around Cloud Foundry, the Australian government is using components of cloud.gov and setting up their own instance of cloud foundry.

So it goes even deeper, even if it's not the same actual system that they're running. The more modular you make things, the better you document, the better you think about making provider agnostic, that kind of thing the more more potential for reuse hillary right now you're very much preaching to the choir like we totally understand these things we are with you 100 of the way all the fans of 18f in the software community and in open source like we already understand all the the virtues of open source and we we, we have a common ground in terms of value and the arguments for. I imagine throughout AT&F's history, there's been pushback, there's been naysayers, there's been fights that you guys have had to fight. Can you give us some insight into how well these ideas and this user-centric digital services, which is something that you believe in and

open source has been to establish as a thing the government should do? You know, it's interesting. There have probably been some conversations and some pushback, but for the most part, we've been really lucky for two reasons. One is we have great support from our agency. So, you know, inside GSA, they believe in what we're doing and they want to give us the air cover and the room to experiment and to try to figure out what the right things to do are. Second thing is that we grew very sort of slowly in the beginning,

and we're lucky to find early customers, early partners, both inside our agency and in other agencies, like the CIO of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, Mark Schwartz. We were able to find great early partners like him who already had Agile teams. They were already drinking the Kool-Aid about open source and user-centered design. And so it enabled us to really kind of build up some wins and build up some talking points and create some stories early on that we could then take out to folks who were new to some of this.

So those two things really kind of set us on a path where, you know, we say all the time uh inside our team you know show don't tell you know show the thing and um and that's what i think enables us to kind of bring folks along who it really may be new to or uh kind of unknown territory um but we also we we insulate ourselves from it a little bit as well, because, you know, we, we write the way that we work and the sort of how of 18F, we write a lot of that into our contracts, if you will. So we don't exactly do contracts, so to speak, but they're called interagency agreements. And we write a lot of, of that stuff into our interagency agreements

so that when people do sign on the bottom line to work with us, they know that we're an open source team, which means we're going to default to being open source unless there's a very, very compelling security, privacy, et cetera, reason not to. But it also means that they know that we're an agile team that uh we're gonna we're gonna talk about it vociferously you know we're gonna blog we're gonna tweet we're gonna we're gonna engage them and uh and talking about this so uh i think that was another key thing that um we decided to do early on uh really just to enable buy-in. I'd add doing a lot of user research, too.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think the biggest pushback comes from, and rightly so, comes from industry. Wanting to work with us, but having a COTS product. It's not going to be open source. It is their bread and butter, how they make money. But they still want to be able to partner with us. They want to be able to compete. They want to be able to partner with us. They want to be able to compete. They want to be able to do the work.

And so I think kind of the next frontier for us is to, at least in our consulting work, is to start doing some work around what can our team do to help shape. Again, if we're trying to essentially make our customers better, savvier buyers of technology, sometimes that does mean kind of understanding the landscape of what's out there. You know, we don't want to build everything from scratch. And so I think, you know, we will start to get involved with kind of understanding market research and maybe creating rubrics around how we do approach some things that are not open source. But it's always going to be an idea, and it's always what we're going to default to, because we do fundamentally believe that even just on the cost and reuse side of things, it's what we want to model for the rest of the government. That process there to, you call them interagency contracts, is that the

right word to term for it? It's an IAA, an interagency agreement. Interagency agreement. So when you do that and you have to do user research and things like that, and you mentioned before you charge a rate, is that research part of it to even get the contract? Is that written into it? How do you account for, I guess, making sure that you remain financially stable? Yeah, it's a delicate balance. We do a little bit of upfront work to basically decide if we can take on a project. So there'll be a little bit of research, there'll be a little bit of discovery, you know, just so that we can decide, do we have the right people with the right skills to approach this? But generally for any kind of heavy type of any heavy user research or heavy discovery period, we engage the agency for short periods of time to do that, you know, two to four to six weeks, essentially to say,

come on board, we'll put together a team to help crack this nut and help figure out this problem and sort of chart the path forward. And so we do charge for those engagements. I imagine just like any other agency, you have the same problems, just different areas. It's about perspective, really. We're getting close to our next break. I want tee up we're gonna talk about on the other side though it's the 18f guide which I think is super awesome it's the repository for best practices you mentioned agile earlier how those that work with you

realize you're an agile team a lot of what you do as 18f as an agency is outlining these guys it may not be exactly customer facing but it's at least transparency. So I think this is pretty interesting. You've got APIs, and then you've got your testing cookbook in there. You've got your agile practices in there. And it may not be super deep for each subject, but this is a lot of information for everybody to... I think it's really interesting just to have the transparency level of that.

Each of them tied back to a repository, so it's open. People can see it. People can contribute. Even if it's simply just a typo. So it's not just code that 18F is producing. So team that up real quick before the break, we'll dive deeper on the other side. Be right back. Our friends at ThoughtWorks have an awesome open source project to share with you. GoCD is an on-premise, open-source continuous delivery server that lets you automate and streamline your build-test-release cycle for reliable continuous delivery. With GoCD's comprehensive pipeline modeling, you can model complex workflows for your team with ease, and the value stream map lets you track a change from commit to deploy at a glance.

The real power is in the visibility it provides over your end-to-end workflow so you can get complete control of and visibility into your deployments across multiple teams. To learn more about GoCD, visit go.cd slash changelog for a free download. It is open source. Commercial support is also available and enterprise add-ons as well, including disaster recovery. Once again, go.cd slash changelog. And now back to the show. Now we're back from the break, and I mentioned the 18F guides beforehand, the repository for best practices across the teams.

I think this is super awesome to have this. I think more, Jared and I have this sort of in behind the scenes to some degree, we have this thing called one voice. It's not exactly our playbook, but to some degree it's, it, it sets the foundation for some things we do. Although Jared speaking out a lot, I think we probably could do better and should do better around following, uh, the 18 F's ways of doing this. I think these guys are really awesome. So we mentioned cloud.gov. We've mentioned micro-purchase and now 18F guides. These are all unique ways that the government

is doing some cool stuff around open source. And this isn't code. This is essentially prose. Yeah, the 18F guides are essentially kind of our documentation of our best practices. You know, being a remote first team, being a distributed team, being an open source team meant that we had to take documentation seriously. And we also had to really think about, you know, kind of codifying some of the ways that we work so that the other

factor that actually plays in here is that we are all on kind of term appointments. So none of us are career civil servants that are going to be around for decades, but we're all here for two to four years. And so there will always be a little bit of churn in our workforce. And so it's super important to document how we work and how we've done things in the past so that people don't have to reinvent the wheel over and over and over again every time someone new joins or someone leaves. Their knowledge is not lost.

So the guides were sort of similar to the origin of cloud.gov. I mean, the guides are selfish in one way, in that our accessibility guide, our analytics guide, our agile guide, our content guide, those are things for us. They're for our team. This is how we think about these topics. But then at the end of the day, we want them to be open and we want them to be a resource that our peers and our partners can also use and learn from. So this is really our way of kind of documenting the heck out of everything that we do and turning it outward for the benefit of the rest of the government and for anyone else who wants to learn a little bit about it.

I think that the first time I saw someone do some guides really well was Thoughtbot, Jared. I don't know if you had seen their playbook. They had it open source. And I was always, I love chat by telling the team he's built at Thoughtbot. I think they've always been inspiration in both as an agency as well as a product team as well as open source. They've definitely led the way.

And for listeners who care, there's an episode of Founders Talk with that where I talked to Chad Pytel about a couple years ago. It was actually just when they were expanding their offices to different countries, and it was pretty interesting. But their playbook was an inspiration to me. So to see you all as a government organization take the same approach to have transparency and, as you mentioned, to codify your term, what you learned that way. So maybe in a couple of years, you won't be in the position you're in anymore with AT&F.

And, but yet your, your knowledge base that you've kind of collected will live on. Yeah. And I think for a lot of our guides, you know, things like the agile guide, for example, you know, a lot of that content is going to be very general purpose and, you know, things like the agile guide, for example, you know, a lot of that content is going to be very general purpose and, you know, it describes our best practices, but I think that would work in, you know, any organization that's trying to adopt those kinds of things. We also have, you know, a lot of things that are very government specific. They're very extensive and, uh, you know, strange and non-intuitive you know regulations and compliance things we have to deal with where you know codifying what we've learned and how we've

learned how we've sort of figured out how to do certain processes for example you know how we manage our github team how we you know what uh ci systems we can use based on what permissions they ask for in github you know things how we do slack and slack integrations and consider them all these kinds of things are very specific to government and not something you probably have to think about outside but us having codified that for you know our internal admins and things to use you know someone else from another agency can see that and say oh well they've already like having codified that for our internal admins and things to use, someone else from another agency can see that and say, oh, well, they've already figured out how to do this in a safe and legal way or regulation-friendly way.

And so we can just reuse that and not have to reinvent the wheel. How does it make onboarding easier? I'm imagining that adding to or taking away from the team has got to be strenuous whenever, you know, there's just so much to learn about. This is a new frontier. This isn't like you've been a 20 or 30 or 40 year old agency inside the government. You're fairly new. So a lot of the things you're doing are sort of new frontier. I got to imagine doing this makes that process easier to add to and take away from the team. Sure. Yeah. I mean, our documentation is available. People before they join can learn about what the onboarding process is like they can read the guides and read you know what's going to be expected of them that kind of

thing uh we even have a tool that we built called uh dolores landingham which is a nod to the west wing character nice okay that uh you know helps with onboarding by essentially doing like a drip campaign over slack so you know on the first day like hey have you remembered to sign up for your health care or whatever on the second day like hey if you have you gone and read this guide you know so that's uh so that's another thing where you know yeah onboarding government is not uh a small feat and so we can sort of have guides and guides and tooling, all of which are open source and reusable, you know,

that can sort of allow that. That's a very cool idea. An internal drip campaign via Slack to onboard people. Yeah. I like that. Yeah. Yeah. That's been reused by other organizations too.

So grab the code. I'm over here perusing your blogging section. You have a section called writing a great post and I'm just taking down notes on how i can be a better blogger so uh when you say general purpose i mean this this this is very general purpose definitely is it essentially if you've learned something do your best to share it here as a guide no it's even better than that like they have specific tips no no I mean like how they add to 18F. Oh. Yeah.

If it's not written down, you know, it sort of lives with that person and that person might leave government. And so, you know, I feel pretty strongly about, you know, if you're really thinking about getting the best bang for the buck in terms of, you know, value to the taxpayers, you you know for a dollar spent essentially like if you don't distill something you've learned into documentation it's you're kind of wasting some value there right so that's always me and jared not so much the blogging side of it was the how do they how do they uh share with the team how to give back through guides yeah that makes total sense i just thought you were talking to me yeah and I don't know how they do that. Well, I'd like to learn. Aiden, why don't you tell us?

That's the way to tell us. So, yeah, I mean, all of our, you know, again, our documentation, just like our code, is in GitHub repositories. Right. And we, you know, welcome contributions there as well um you know and we try and you know specify when things are you know hnf specific versus or government specific versus something we think is general um yeah i mean open issues like don't be you know we none of our projects are so our rails or you know something to that sort of scale where we are worried about like noise from issues so like just don't hesitate to you know to open issues ask questions like we're happy to talk and we're always excited uh tweet at us you know

whatever whatever method you'll get you'll get in touch with us engage basically yeah and um you know we also have uh some open slack channels so uh chat.18f.gov you can you can join some of our public slack channels and talk to us there so yeah any really any way you can get in touch with us you'll be connected to the right people and you know figure out we'll help you figure out what you want to contribute to that kind of thing very cool we're going to add the chat.18f.gov into the show notes for sure because yeah i love it whenever organizations like yours embrace the general public being able to reach out, whether it's a GitHub issue or a Slack channel. I think this is certainly, or even the guides being open source.

I mean, this is something to be celebrated and to be modeled after. Yeah, we'd love to hear from people. So one thing we wanted to talk about before we began to close out was something we probably couldn't shy away from if we did the show. The last thing, Jared, or I want when someone listens to this to say, hey, this post came out on the Washington Post, and you didn't even mention it, and you talked about sustainability, you talked about the stability of 18F,

and you didn't mention this clickbait-type title post. I mean, it's probably a great post from Joe Davidson, who's a columnist there, but the title is Why a Federal High Tech Startup is a Money Loser, and it's just basically talking about how AT&F is essentially destined to lose money and has been losing money, and it kind of outlines some of the things, and it was even in the breaks we've mentioned when we were going to talk about this, and so, Hillary, you mentioned this. Non-endorsed, I guess, it's written from a fan of 18F that says the exact opposite, which is 18F is hardly a waste of money.

So we have these two angst here. And just generally, as an organization who cares about open source and the stability of it, and we certainly have outlined some of the value you've added back in. And to add value, you always have to invest. It's not always about just simply making money or, you know, financially profiting, so to speak, but having good software for our government agencies, good practices for our government agencies, and certainly a beacon of light for other agencies like Singapore or other countries like Singapore to be able to, you know, pick up some of these things and do this. But I'm kind of curious what your thoughts are on that post or these posts and maybe help us understand the backstory here.

Yeah, absolutely. The backstory is that each federal agency has an inspector general and the inspector general, known as the IG for short, of that agency is essentially generally charged with ferreting out waste, fraud and abuse. And, you know, we've been saying for two years that our time was coming because every program gets audited at some point or another. And 18F went under audit by our IG starting at the beginning of 2016. And so basically from about January through July or August, I think, we were essentially under review. And mostly they were scrutinizing our finances. And it's probably a little bit more information than we need, but essentially, 18F is funded by an internal revolving fund

that is inside the GSA. So it's a fund called the Acquisition Services Fund, which is managed by one of the top-line business units in GSA called the Federal Acquisition Service. It's a seed fund, essentially. Yeah, the Acquisition Services Fund is essentially a revolving fund that they use to purchase kind of good-for-government services and tools, essentially. And so they made an investment in 18F. We have a three year memorandum of understanding with them that essentially says, you know, we're going to be your startup fund. And when we use the ASF, as we call it, programs are required to have a plan to get back to cost neutral. So we've got to be cost recoverable. We've got to eventually get to the place where we are putting our investment,

you know, putting the investment back into the fund. And so I think to date over the last three years, we have lost about $10 million a year. But again, we grew from, you know, you know 10 to 200 uh we've made investments i mean it's interesting we've focused on projects like cloud.gov like the micro purchase platform um even our guides that as we discussed like we could not we could not operate as a as an efficient team nor could we plan to be a sustainable and efficient team into the future without those guides and without all that documentation. That all takes time.

And it's unbillable time. It's things that we don't build to anyone but ourselves. And that's what we got scrutinized for in this report was really kind of not putting enough back into the fund. But we are on track. We have a similar investigation was actually done by the, I never get the acronym right, the GAO, the General Attributability Office looked into both 18F and USDS over the summer as well.

You know, what we've confirmed is that we do have a plan to get there. We've been saying that we will probably be cost neutral in 2019. And in the meantime, we are growing revenue. I think the stat that we put in our blog post as a response to that IG report was that just from fiscal year 2015 to 2016, I think there was a 69% increase in revenue. So we are growing our pipeline. We are growing our business.

And we also are now able to spend less time on some of this foundational work. We've invested the time in the Agile Blanket Purchase Agreement so that we now have 17 other vendors that we can go to to help us scale our efforts. We've invested the time in the micro-purchase platform. So now that we've got 92 other businesses that are helping us do small tasks, we've invested the time in these guides and things like that. So I think it's just really important to kind of not miss the forest or the tree. Absolutely, we haven't been perfect. We've been in startup mode, but we're on the right path. I think it's also worth noting that if you just frame it in terms

of expenditures or revenue, all of government that is not the IRS is a money loser. They're not bringing in money, and that's not really the point they're providing value and that costs money um you know we are doing a lot of things to try and you know operate more leanly and and you know have better um or you know have have smaller overhead that kind of thing to try and reach uh cost recoverability but it wasn't a waste in that you know that money was just poured down the drain or something like that. That was, you know, like Hillary said, went to, you know, building, building projects that went to, um, you know, developing documentation that went to, uh, you know, the work we've done with our partners, et cetera. It's just, it hasn't,

it hasn't balanced out to the point that we need it to. And so we're working towards that but it wasn't just gone you think because of the model applied of the startup uh business agency uh inside the government this this unique thing that you're held to a higher standard to produce revenue because of that well yeah i mean it certainly is unusual right for i mean, GSA is the only agency that I really know of that, you know, is meant to have these kind of revenue neutral programs. So it is unusual for government. And, you know, that means we're operating more like a business than, you know, a normal government agency.

Yeah. So it's certainly challenging and yeah, we're not perfect, but we are constantly improving and, you know, on track to get there. We'll definitely link up both the article in the Washington Post post by Joe Davidson, as well as the Medium post by, I believe, a third party fan or someone who just isn't supportive 18F so that people can read those for their own. Adam, real quick, you mentioned this. You're sure this is a good article. I just want to say he did use a good pun in his article, The Washington Post.

He said he gives the 18F's financial administration an F. Get it? Mm. Mm. So good. That's journalism right there. Just one F, 18F. Yeah, really.

Tom Van Antwerp. Good job. Well, let's end on a, on a bit of a happier note, uh, in terms of people getting involved. And,

uh, one thing you already mentioned, Aiden, was the Slack channel. But for those open source hackers out there who like what you guys are up to and your mission and the way you're going about building user-centric systems and open source things what are some ways that we the community of of open source developers can help 18f and its purpose yeah so there's a blog post from a few months ago called something like you know a bunch of 18f reusable tools or you know tools that you can reuse in your organizations or something like that and for that we sort, you know, tools that you can reuse in your organizations or

something like that. And for that, we sort of, you know, combed through our vast number of GitHub repositories and looked for projects that, you know, aren't going to be the FEC homepage, the Federal Election Commission homepage or something like that, but are more, you know, reasonable tools that we think could be could be applied in different contexts. So that's a good one, especially if you are interested in finding 18F projects that can be used for your, you know, for, for whatever team you're on. Uh, we do use the help wanted tag on GitHub, um, on a number of repositories. So you can search for that. You can tweet at us, you know, that's honestly, you know, if you tell us like what your skills are

and what you're interested in it might be the easiest way to to be directed to something um or ask and ask in slack etc is your twitter account the 18f twitter account pretty active in terms of actually reaching you know a team member or is it a more of a announcement style black hole there are real people behind that account. Yeah. Cool. Yeah, we definitely respond to any questions or things like that that are tweeted to us. And it's just at 18F, as you would expect, on Twitter.

So that's pretty easy. Yeah. Can't get any easier than that besides at Hillary. There you go. So we are really close on time. You'd mentioned earlier though, in the break. And I,

I hate to broach another subject, but if there's like a quick mention, you can mention about new stuff at code.gov. I know you blogged about it recently. There's a lot of interesting things happen there. You just give us a 30 second version of what's happening there. That'd be awesome. Yeah.

So the federal government, uh, the office of management and budget uh specifically in the white house um just adopted a federal source code policy so this is saying that you know basically we the federal government want to have our commitment to public domain to actually translate into source code being available and so yeah code.gov is sort of an accompanying piece to this policy providing a list of actual you know code repositories from various agencies and the sort of collector of those as well as you know providing guidance to agencies on how to you know kind of do open source like How do you deal with mixed licenses? How do you deal with outside contributors? Do they need to sign a contributor license agreement?

What sorts of protections do you need to have on your source code in terms of what gets merged? That kind of thing. It's a kind of hybrid of public-facing in the sense that here are projects that you might be interested in, or here's what the government has available, as well as government-focused guidance. Very cool. Yeah, it's code.gov. And I know there's some recent blog posts on the AT&F blog about that, so we'll link up a couple of those, some new, interesting things happening there. I think that's certainly a good thing. That's the next milestone is the headline for this post on November 7th, the next milestone in federal open source code. So certainly wanted to mention that before we close up the show,

but if there's anything else that either of you want to mention before we close out, this is a chance to do it. So if you have anything you want to close with, if you got the ear of the open source world, something you can share, that's, uh,

you know, about your journey, uh, advice, inspiration, whatever to kind of close out on. Well, I think, um, you know, in case people stumble across this and they work for government, whether it's federal government or state government or local governments, um, and maybe they, they haven't done too much open source just yet. But one thing that we've been doing lately is to challenge folks to say, you know, take one project, one project that you're working on this year and try to open source it.

And I think that's just really important as we start to see this ethos kind of take over across government and not just federal government or state government. Because again, you know, we're actually starting to see some cities kind of working together to, to solve problems, you know, in San Francisco, they're really interested in getting two or three or four cities together to figure out how to solve something with regard to transit or identity. And open source is going to be the path forward with that.

So that's really exciting. That's a great way to close, Hillary. And you actually have a guide to back it up. There's an 18F open source DAGA, which is essentially a process to name your project, making the repo descriptions clear, readme documentation. So if anybody out there is listening, as Hilly just said, we're going to link up in the show notes this open source style guide to kind of help you take that next step, which Hilly asked you to do. And if you're in government and you listen to this show, reach out to us. We want to hear what you have to say about

this project and just in general your questions on open source. You can email us at editors at changelog.com or hit us up on GitHub. We have an open inbox there called ping. So if you go to github.com slash the changelog slash ping, submit an issue. We'd like to do that in the public because Jared, how cool is that? I mean, this show started as an open source or an open repo ping, right? And it's our open inbox. It helps us at mention Hillary, at mention Aiden, and be able to pull them into the show and have this conversation. Absolutely. We love it.

So definitely go out there. If you have show ideas, send them to us. We are all ears. All ears. And with that, that is the show. So we'll close out. Hillary and Aiden, thank you so much for your service for our country and the government and as uh as fellow hackers we appreciate your care and love for the open source uh software out there as well as the community that powers it and uh making it such an

important endeavor for our country to support and and uh that's that's just super awesome and listeners thank you so much for tuning in to this show. And with that, let's say goodbye. Bye. Thanks. Oh, bye. Bye.

Bye. Love you. We'll see you next time.