Technology
18F is an office inside the General Services Administration that helps other federal agencies build, buy, and share efficient and easy-to-use digital services. We’re a team of technology experts that work with agencies to diagnose problems and then work alongside agency teams to find the right solutions.
Headquartered at 18 and F streets in Washington, D.C., we’re an office of federal employees acting as a civic consultancy for the government. We’re transforming government from the inside out, creating cultural change by working with teams inside agencies who want to create great services for the public…
18F employees live all over the country. We work out of homes in Dayton and Tucson, St. Louis and Chapel Hill — and in federal buildings in San Francisco, Chicago, New York City, and Washington, D.C.
That means many of our project teams are also made up of distributed employees working all over the country. For example, you may have a developer in Austin, a designer in Washington, D.C., and a content strategist in Portland — but they’re all working on the same team and with the same partners.
Because we work on distributed teams so frequently, we’ve developed certain strategies for working well as a collaborative operation….
- We have a “remote first” mindset.
- We have a five-hour overlap in our workdays.
- We share our screens frequently.
- We have face-to-face meetings at least once a week.
- We make our work transparent to each other.
- We over-communicate, especially with clients.
- For this to work well, we all think of ourselves as remote employees, even if we’re in an office….
For many on the 18F team, working in this collaborative environment is second nature, but we understand that not everyone is used to working this way. Part of 18F’s mission is to show our partners across the federal government just how these tools can be used to maximum effect. Also, by having our distributed teams fully integrated into the workflow, we provide our partners a nearly 12-hour workday to spend on their projects.
Just as the cassette tape replaced the 8-track, only to be replaced in turn by the compact disc, itself being undercut by MP3 players, … online free newspaper sites such as The Huffington Post and the National Review Online are leading to creative destruction of the traditional paper newspaper….
In fact, successful innovation is normally a source of temporary market power, eroding the profits and position of old firms, yet ultimately succumbing to the pressure of new inventions commercialised by competing entrants….
In philosophical terms, the concept of ‘creative destruction’ is close to Hegel‘s concept of sublation. It was introduced into German economic discourse by Werner Sombart in 1913 … It has been argued that Sombart’s formulation of the concept was influenced by Eastern mysticism, specifically the image of the Hindu god Shiva….
In Hinduism, the god Shiva is simultaneously destroyer and creator, portrayed as Shiva Nataraja (Lord of the Dance), which is proposed as the source of the Western notion of ‘creative destruction.’
- Excerpts from Wikipedia
Great ideas. That is what we are all after isn’t it? That one spark that leads to an empire, money and power? Well, I’ve got news for you. Ideas are yesterdays news. Passé. Done. Last century…. The difference between a nice idea and a very successful idea has always been execution, timing and a large dose of luck….
[Amazon and Ebay] thrived more because of their long-term vision and attention to details and less because they had his single, cool and innovative, idea. Twitter wasn’t just a good idea either. In fact, most people at the time agreed it wasn’t much of an idea at all.
I spoke to one of the early investors recently who told me ‘nobody saw it coming. We invested in Evan Williams because we believed in him as an entrepreneur and he only needed a small sum of money. But we all hoped he would quickly transform his service into something entirely different’. What Twitter did have was a working prototype, that people liked to use. And that is really all you need.
- Excerpts from The Next Web
Creating a clean economy will not be easy. It will require sustained, consistent, and large-scale investment across many sectors, including transportation, building systems and appliances, energy generation, and of course the electric grid itself. … As a percentage of GDP, China, Germany, and even Brazil are investing at a rate three times greater than the U.S. …
China is … making longer-term, sustained commitments that are much larger. The country is already in the process of building 16,000 miles of high-speed rail (roughly 16,000 more than the U.S.). And China is bringing together 16 state-run companies to put one million electric cars on the road within a few years. …
As an indication of how serious China really is, the country has built the largest solar and wind production industries in the world in just a few years. …
But it was the country’s ten-year plan that made some jaws drop. Between now and 2020, the country will invest 5 trillion yuan in the clean economy. That works out to about $75 to $100 billion per year for 10 years running (smart grid investment alone is estimated at $60 to $100 billion over the next decade). Imagine the U.S. Congress passing the equivalent of the highly controversial stimulus package 10 times over (not likely).
- Excerpts from Harvard Business Review
Finding the right place is as important as—if not more important than— finding the right job or partner because it not only influences those choices but also determines how easy or hard it will be to correct mistakes made along the way. Still, few of us actually look at a place that way. Perhaps it’s because so few of us have the understanding or mental framework necessary to make informed choices about our location.
The place we choose to live affects every aspect of our being. It can determine the income we earn, the people we meet, the friends we make, the partners we choose, and the options available to our children and families. People are not equally happy everywhere, and some places do a better job of providing a high quality of life than others. Some places offer us more vibrant labor markets, better career prospects, higher real estate appreciation, and stronger investment and earnings opportunities. Some places offer more promising mating markets. Others are better environments for raising children.
Where we live is increasingly important to every facet of our lives. We owe it to ourselves to think about the relationship between place and our economic future, as well as our personal happiness, in a more systematic —if different— way.
In a society as complex and technologically sophisticated as ours, the most urgent projects require the coordinated contributions of many talented people. Whether the task is building a global business or discovering the mysteries of the human brain, one person can’t hope to accomplish it, however gifted or energetic he or she may be.
There are simply too many problems to be identified and solved, too many connections to be made.
And yet, even as we make the case for collaboration, we resist the idea of collective creativity. Our mythology refuses to catch up with our reality. We cling to the myth of the Lone Ranger, the romantic idea that great things are usually accomplished by a larger-than-life individual working alone.
Despite the evidence to the contrary, we still tend to think of achievement in terms of the Great Man or Great Woman, instead of the Great Group.
But in a global society, in which timely information is the most important commodity, collaboration is not simply desirable, it is inevitable.