Help Us Create vets.gov | Hacker News Reader

Help Us Create vets.gov

vets.gov

72 pointsbrandonb21 comments

FYI, the new vets.gov is a collaboration between the US Digital Service, one of the startups that came out of healthcare.gov (Ad Hoc LLC), the VA, and others:

  https://adhocteam.us/

  https://www.whitehouse.gov/digital/united-states-digital-service

  https://www.fastcompany.com/3046756/obama-and-his-geeks

If anybody has questions, I know there are USDS and Ad Hoc people who read HN.

I wonder if the US Digital Service will survive after the next president takes office? Do they have a federal mandate at this point or do they operate at the pleasure of Obama in particular? For example if a Republican took office would that person have to go out of their way to keep or ditch the services?

As I understand it, USDS is in the Executive Office of the President and would be very easy for a new President to dismantle, but its counsin 18F in GSA I slightly more secure (obviously, nothing in federal government is secure against strong enough political will against it.)

What would happen to USDS federal government employees with a two year contract?

As I understand, and I could be wrong, they have a limited term civil service appointment, not a contract for a fixed term; this is a maximum period for which they can be in a position, not a set time for which employment is promised.

Interesting. Thanks for the reply!

For a second, I thought that this was going to be an open source project and I was excited to be able to contribute.

https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/vets-websi... :-)

Awesome. Thank you!

Is there any way those of us who are more experienced on the backend can help out?

hmmm, one thing we could really use is some tests. Maybe you could write some simple capybara/rspec or equivalent integration tests for the site, just to make sure that its parts are functioning correctly?

Since this is a Jekyll site, I'm not sure what we could wrap tests around. The beauty of the static site generator is that it just always works -- at least as far as the html content is concerned.

Is there a specific javascript feature or interactive feature that you'd like help with testing?

It does work great! We've gotten this far without them. But it makes me nervous.

I'd like to have a few smoke tests to guard against things like:

* accidental deletion of pages

* accidental removal of header/footer/important elements

* proper 508 compliance

* valid HTML/JS/CSS (and probably lint all those things too)

Also the facility locator is a fair-sized hunk of JS I wrote that needs tests.

edit: also, in the future there will surely be more dynamic parts to the site, so getting a framework in place for tests will both save work and raise the expectation of quality

It's more like you want a linter with custom rules for how you think a page should look. Actually, it's impressive to create the entire site with only content and simple layout. It's interesting there isn't a better way to manage and edit all that content...

508 Compliance is another interesting point. Open source scanner to assess if a page complies? It's another linter, it has to look at the html. I don't know much about 508 but I'm going to say from a quick look at your <html> that it's as clean as you could possibly hope for, and I would expect that latest screen reading tools would be able to navigate it. If that's not the case it says more about the particular reading tool than the website.

The facility locator! That was interesting, the default state is everything selected, please flip it to everything deselected. I haven't tried it out more because it overloaded ;-)

Benefits comparison tool also looks like it has a pretty big data set behind it, that was probably cool to develop.

It doesn't look too bad... wonder how many millions of dollars it cost to set up?

I understand the cynicism but....a lot of people I know have dealt with a lot of VA incompetence (myself included). This is a necessary and productive step in the right direction.

It could cost an awful lot of money and still be cheaper than continuing with the mess we have now.

One cool thing at least we get to use all their work for free in our own projects... so hopefully it's good work worth reusing! (usually far too much to ask, but not too much to hope)

Its titled 'Help us create vets.gov' and I don't see any call to action where I can contribute or find out more.

What sort of help are they looking for: content feedback, or hands-on stuff like front-end code?

There's a lightbulb in the bottom right you can click to give feedback. We have already gotten feedback that it's a little hard to find so we will fix that in the next day or so! And if you're a coder we would love comments and PRs in Github.

Im a front-end coder, non-American, but with lots of US family. I have been so excited about the recent web frameworks and resources being created for US gov services and if there was ever a project guaranteed to affect the lives of millions - this is it!

I specialize in responsive styling, and building self-responsive content blocks that can displayed or embedded in any layout or page. Im not sure where to get started sending PRs from the wild - is there a roadmap explaining what help is needed most, or where my skills could be put to best use?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com