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eddietejeda

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

We also implement the USWDS, which you can follow here: https://github.com/18F/federalist-uswds-jekyll

Let me know if you have any questions!

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I 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.

Applaud us when getting FOIA requests responded to doesn’t require retaining lawyers.

We 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.

Not data but a strong anecdote to support your assertion: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/04/08/linux...

Indeed! If people just assume you’re corrupt, incompetent, lazy, etc: why even try?

I 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.

Doesn't apply to works by contractors paid by the government though. I don't know which this font is.

Seems to be Open Font License since the font is based on Libre Franklin, which is OFL licensed.

> Doesn't apply to works by contractors paid by the government though.

Depends on the terms and conditions of the contract. Keep trying to get people to ensure they secure rights for the government by default but it's a constant struggle to get people to sweat the details :p

Hello, are your web analytics also publicly available ?

Th EU has 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.

https://analytics.usa.gov

>> 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.

I 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.

Because ~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.

Web fonts are very slow

On the list of things that make most sites slow. Web fonts is pretty low. Moh tajns if shitty JavaScript is a much bigger problem.

If you use link rel preload and font-display: optional, it's fine.

Every time I've visited a site where I thought, oh that's a terrible font, it's been basically one of these reasons:

  * Improper selection of default font for constrained display eg tabular
  * Or the more popular "Let's create a font because we can.  It's branding."

There are of course other considerations involved like the increasing diversity of rendering devices, but that doesn't make the fact that any web site font issue is nearly always the fault of the web site operator.

I can't recall any instance of "oh, that website with a great custom font is so appealing I'm going regularly and voraciously consume its content". The opposite of that is true though.

I know there have been a couple of occurrences where I dropped into the web dev tools to see which font a site was using because they used beautifully, fitting fonts.

Properly selected, fonts contribute to the user experience so seamlessly that most users don't even realize that the font used is something out of the ordinary.

This is similar in effect to users liking a site more when it is faster, but attributing the improvement to any number of other things that haven't actually changed.

This is an interesting perspective, and one that could only exist in the past few decades.

For millennia, of course, the written word would appear in the particular style of an individual scribe, and might take on an entirely different look when copied by another. Gutenberg’s movable type introduced the concept of a text appearing exactly the same across multiple copies, something that has persisted for centuries through lead type, phototypesetting, and into PDFs. Only with the advent of information technology in the 20th century did the idea arise of text appearing in formats other than those chosen by its publisher, advanced by technologies such as TeX and HTML.

In the latter’s case, however, the original idea of a platonically structured document to be interpreted per the user’s preferences has long since been superseded by a return to the concept of the publisher defining the presentation. Client CSS never caught on, while server CSS took over.

Users don't select their preferred font in their own browser. That's pretty much the end of it.

Some of us do, and that's probably the best lifehack I've found so far.

Enforcing the same font and size across all pages is ergonomic and does lower the cognitive overhead of recalibrating your sight-reading for every new page you visit. Just my two cents...

I was very pleasantly surprised by USWDS, so great work to everyone involved!

Curious to hear if your group is still well supported budget wise?

Although 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.

Can you comment on what organizations are your biggest customers? Are you concerned about austerity measures / cutbacks affecting customer budgets?

>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?

Yes, I meant to imply but I meant specifically in light of the current presidential administration and its posture toward government spending.

The current administration is running a trillion dollar annual deficit. How much more should the public sector be spending?

The ones that have congressional appropriations funding them aren’t.

Eddie is this something you think would be interesting to talk about on The Changelog ~> https://changelog.com/podcast

We've talked about 18F with Hillary Hartley and Aidan Feldman in the past here ~> https://changelog.com/podcast/230

Get in touch at editors@changelog.com if you're interested!

Do you (18f) have any success with redesigning internal government sites, those that require smart cards to access?

Some of those are the worst.

I 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.

^ 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.

I clicked on a couple of the example sites and they appeared to be down. Any idea what's up?

https://cio.gov

https://performance.gov/

Both were up for me when I tried them just now (12 minutes after your comment).

GitHub for content management? How do you approach training?

Asking because I think this approach rocks but have a hard time selling it internally.

Cool I used the USWDS styleguide for a govt site I designed and coded in 2017. The USWDS had just been released.

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