GSA Blog

Our work

18F is funded out of the acquisition services fund and we sign agreements with partner agencies to recover our costs. In the last 12 months:

• We signed 116 agreements for new work with partner agencies
• We continued or modified 8 agreements
• 25 unique agencies in the federal government have worked with 18F
• 13 agreements were signed for work in the Presidential Innovation Fellowship program

Our team is committed to building human-centered tools and applications for the public. As part of that commitment we spent more than 700 person-hours talking to real people who will use our products.Last year we reported how many people we talked to, but reporting person hours gets at a deeper dimension of our research that we think is more valuable. Sometimes talking to one person for two hours is more valuable than talking to eight people for 15 minutes.

Our work is open source. Here are some numbers about our 521 repositories on GitHub:

• Most popular project: The Draft U.S. Web Design Standards with 323 forks and 2,942 stars
• 106 repos forked by 18F
• 7 18F employees contributed code upstream to projects we use.
• At least 47 tools developed by 18F employees are available on a package manager like rubygems, npm, or PyPI.

One of our biggest initiatives this year was helping change the way the government buys technology. The most visible of that work was the Agile BPA and our micro-purchasing experiments, done in partnership with General Service Administration’s Federal Acquisition Service in the Pacific Rim Region, headquartered in San Francisco.

• 200 companies competed across all three pools
• 40 prototypes submitted for pool three were considered exceptional by our review team
• 17 companies were ultimately awarded space in pool three
• 22 vendors put in 208 total bids across the 22 reverse auctions hosted by 18F
• Three auctions sold to a bidder for $1
• 19 bids were made on the most competitive auction
• A few hours: the fastest time it took to turn around a winning auction
• 2 reverse auctions done on behalf of a client: GSA’s FedRamp and the Federal Acquisition Service

Our team

18F started as a team of 15 people in DC. On our first birthday, we had 76 employees in 11 cities. In the last 12 months we continued to hire public servants around the country to join our team. Here’s what we look like today:

• 21 new Presidential Innovation Fellows
• 97 new 18F team members, bringing our team to a total size of 178
• We are hiring at a rate of 25 new employees per quarter
• We have staff in 30 cities across the country
• We have four offices in DC, San Francisco, New York, and Chicago
• 43 percent of our staff works in DC, 19 percent in San Francisco, eight percent in Chicago, and seven percent in New York
• The remaining 23 percent of the team works remotely from one of the following cities:
  • Atlanta, GA
  • Austin, TX
  • Boston, MA
  • Carrboro, NC
  • Charlottesville, VA
  • Cincinnati, OH
  • Clinton, MS
  • Davis, CA
  • Dayton, OH
  • Denver, CO
  • Durham, NC
  • Jackson, WY
  • Lawrence, KS
  • Los Angeles, CA
  • Northampton, MA
  • Minneapolis, MN
  • Philadelphia, PA
  • Pittsburgh, PA
  • Portland, OR
  • Raleigh, NC
  • Roanoke, VA
  • Richmond, VA
  • Santa Barbara, CA
  • San Diego, CA
  • Seattle, WA
  • St. Louis, MO
  • Tucson, AZ

Outreach

We wrote 66 blog posts our first year. This blog remains an important forum for engaging with our users, other federal agencies, and the public about our products. This year was an even bigger year for us:

• We wrote 140 new posts, which is a 112 percent increase from last year
• Our audience grew, too. Every month we had more readers than that last, with a mean year-on-year pageview growth rate of 577 percent
• September was our biggest month with 79,102 pageviews, that’s a 1,272 percent growth compared to September 2014

In addition to the blog, we launched our newsletter in June 2015 with 4,000 subscribers. Over time we’ve grown that to 6,035. And in case you’d like to subscribe, you can do that at the bottom of this post.