18F: Government Technology Through Iterative Learning

GSA has been working on building the 18F team for a few months. Last summer, the agency took over operational management of the Presidential Innovation Fellows program. Many PIFs stayed on at GSA to work full time on building products and working on client services. Our mission is to build and deliver services that work for the user while significantly driving down cost. By bringing the people, principles and values of the technology startup world together with the most effective people inside government, we believe we can assist agencies in better serving the American people.

We expect to build user-centric digital services for a fraction of the cost of procuring the same technology through traditional public sector methods.

We will build technology through iterative learning. 18F will push minimum viable products (MVP) to the user base early and often to shorten the “build, measure, learn” cycle as much as possible. During these learning cycles, we will be open and transparent about how we work, when we succeed and fail, and what we have learned from the process.

Our goal is two-fold: first, we will build user-centric digital services, and second, we will prove that building technology in an agile manner is possible in government at a wide scale.

In a world where technology changes the way we live and work almost every day, providing government services in a manner that the American people expect is more important than than ever before. Delivering a 21st century government meets those expectations and we have a responsibility to provide our partner agencies with state-of-the-art support.

Talented people will be attracted to 18F’s strong mission and great work environment. The mission of 18F can compete with any other technology organization and we have built a talented and exciting team to date that contributes to our great workplace.

We are partnering with agencies across government to deliver public facing services via web applications, data and service APIs, and platform services. While 18F will provide certain services to the American people through products and platforms like FBOpen and MyUSA, much of the work the delivery team will accomplish will be through working with other agencies to help deliver mission-focused web and digital services.

Agencies should see 18F as a new way to procure, build and deliver innovative technology, digital services, and citizen-facing applications using insourced talent and applying lean startup techniques. 18F operates using three models: for you, with you, or by you. We can build your solution for you, work with your team and provide additional expertise and needed core capacity, or consult on how to build and buy user-centric interfaces most effectively.

18F is already at work at several agencies throughout government, shipping products early and often. In a year, we hope to increase the size of our team, increasing our capacity to help agencies better deliver on their missions. 18F seeks to be a successful model for procuring, building, and delivering tech and digital services and scaling that model governmentwide. In a few years, we seek to apply this model across federal government.