18F's New Year's resolution: Be even more open | Hacker News Reader

18F's New Year's resolution: Be even more open

18f.gsa.gov

54 pointsdikaiosune18 comments

Would love more feedback on how to do this! (I co-wrote that blog post.)

Looks great Melody! Appreciate the hard work 18F is tackling!

EDIT: I notice you mentioned a newsletter for asking for help:

> To that end, we might use our newsletter as a way to explicitly ask for help. For example, we could include three specific open issues in each newsletter that the public could jump in on.

Something the Coders For Sanders team has found effective is using Slack. I noticed you use Slack as well (from your screenshot). Perhaps 18F could spinup an 18F outreach Slack team, where people with tech skills could join and interact with 18F employees. It closes the feedback loop faster than a mailing list or newsletter.

Some of our project already have a public Slack channel where you can chat with the project team, but that is an area where we can improve. You can sign up here. https://chat.18f.gov/

*I work at 18F.

Thank you!

How have you managed the community in the Slack room while keeping up with your own work?

Frequent switching between teams and the judicious use of @username/@channel :/

Other than that, prioritizing what's important and needs to get done in both.

I love what you guys are doing. I have a group of young and foreign developers, and I seriously want to get them involved with things like this more. There is so many good ideas that could help the government.

How can I leverage these young minds to get excited?

Do you have hackathons?

Do you have an incubator?

Do you have an open list of problems with grants?

These are the type of things that I think would help. Feel free to email me at jbhatab@gmail.com if you wanna chat more :D.

They can find all of our repositories here: https://github.com/18F

And our blog, which details many of our projects, is here: https://18f.gsa.gov/blog/

We occasionally hold hackathons but the best way to get involved is through our repos! They can also fork/adapt any of the projects they see there.

That's awesome, but it's not quite what I'm looking for. This is great for a person who knows what they want to do or is already a developer, but I have more entrepreneurial minded people that I feel wouldn't know what to do if I sent them this link. I may be wrong, but I think something more in the vein of an 'current government problems' page or a way to submit your ideas would be interesting. Maybe a network where people can find cofounders and ideate with like minded individuals. I want them to feel like making an idea happen in the government is just as awesome and scalable as a 'standard' startup idea.

They might be interested in Code for America's Brigade groups, which are civic technology volunteer groups that meet regularly in many cities (including outside the US): https://www.codeforamerica.org/brigade/

Once again thank you and I'm still impressed by what you are putting out, but that still isn't quite what they click with.

To be honest a lot of the tech startup people I interact with have tremendous egos and they need to know the end of the tunnel fulfills that ego, so big money startups is what resonates with them. I'm looking for the marriage of startups and government basically.

I'm just being hyper critical, but I figured raw feedback would help

Probably not a good fit for 18F then. Its a good fit if you want to work on open source projects that'll help the US government work more efficiently.

Disclaimer: No affiliation

That sounds more like politics to my ears, FWIW.

Challenge.gov might be about as close as you can get to a list of government problems with money attached to them. The government has lots of ways it supports small businesses, but 18F doesn't have a specific incubator.

It's pretty simple. Be open when it makes you look good, keep secrets when the information doesn't make you look good.

Are you referring to 18F specifically, or just to the US government? I've been quite impressed by what I've seen from 18F so far, so I'd be curious to hear more about it if your comment was directed specifically at them.

No, not them specifically

I like. I am adult of 36

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