Civic hacking: build your cred while doing good
Transcript of Civic hacking: build your cred while doing good
Civic hacking:Build your cred while doing good
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Hi, I’m Fureigh!
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18F is a digital consultancy for the U.S. government, inside the U.S. government.
WHAT?
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Just start.MVP.Learn and iterate.
Delivery is the strategy.
180+ people45% DC55% everywhere else
Making an impact while building your open source portfolio
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Why contribute to open source?
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● Share your work and express yourself.
● Develop new skills.
● Build community, learn from others.
● Build your portfolio.
● Some of us just like to be helpful.
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And why civic tech?
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IMPACT
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community-minded
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You are uniquely qualified.
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Okay, but also...
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Open source is your friend
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There’s aworld out there
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This is 18F!
We are 18F!
We are 18F!
And many cities and states.
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There’s alsoCode for America.
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ex: Adopt-a-Hydrant
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So how do you find these people?
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Meetups (find one or start one)
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Civic Tech Issue Findercodeforamerica.org/geeks/civicissues
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I can haz issue?
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Code contributions are not the only contributions.
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Back to finding issues.
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Cloud.govAnalytics.USA.govCollege ScorecardEvery Kid in a ParkIdentity Managementbeta.FEC.gov + FEC’s first API
Some 18F projects
So many technical options!
The U.S. Web Design Standards
PART ZERO
We're designing for 320 million peopleThe population of the United States
This is Joanne.
1/ But wait — there’s more
PART ONE
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$86 billion
is spent a year on federal IT projects
94%
of federal IT projects are over budget and behind schedule
Just to show how this scales...Why this matters
40%
of them never see the light of day — they’re scrapped or abandoned
2/ Why it’s like this
PART TWO
Buying IT is not the same as buying pencils and tanks.
Our work happens in silos.
Bureaucracy over human needs.
Forced to comply with outdated regulations.
It became clear that if we wanted to help Joanne, we had to help the people making these digital services.
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The question in front of us became:
Is it possible to create a shared set of tools to provide consistent, effective, and easy-to-use government websites?
Could we build easy-to-use tools that serve the public’s need?
We think this is possible.
Here are the principles that guided us:
Flexible: Create a design system for wide use across agencies and brands
Accessible: They must work for everybody, regardless of abilities
Reusable: Save time and money – there’s no need to reinvent the wheel
Open source: Increase knowledge, shared understanding, and practices across projects
A consistent look and feel with common design elements will feel familiar, trustworthy, and secure.
We built the Standards to be lightweight
● Just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript● Sass preprocessor language
○ Sass add-ons (thoughtbot’s Bourbon and Neat)● Component-based design
3/ Accessibility
PART THREE
Accessible out of the box
● Start with HTML5 with ARIA
● Testing Section 508 features
● Developed with WCAG 2.0 AA in mind
4/ In the wild
PART FOUR
“I like the clean format. I like that it shows me all the things I need to fill out all at once. I can read it fine. Sometimes I need my reading glasses because of the colors, but this is good because it's got sharp contrast.”
Good civic design is about accessIt means that people can get the right help, sooner, with less stress.
5/ Open source from day one
PART FIVE
We <3 our contributors
What if I want to work on something else?
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Start your own band.
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18F.gsa.govjoin.18F.gov
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codeforamerica.org/geeks/civicissues
github.com/18F/web-design-standards/issues
github.com/18F
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