What’s cooking at 18F
Connecting state and local government leaders
Summaries of a few recent projects from the digital services delivery group.
18F is the digital services group in the General Services Administration, whose goal is to promote innovation among agencies by creating and sharing open source applications specific to government. Some of its recent work, posted to Github, includes the following:
dodsbir-scrape is a python module for extracting DOD Small Business Innovation Research topics from http://dodsbir.net. It can get a list of topic numbers and solicitation information, get the topic from topic number or get all topics and save as a JSON file. So far, the scraper doesn't retrieve questions and answers associated with topics.
Communicart combines the features of a shopping cart with the those of an informal email conversation to create a permanent, searchable, archived record of why a particular group of objects was purchased and who approved this purchase. It is an effort to empower P-Card holders and GSA Advantage users to purchase as efficiently and effectively as possible. More on Communicart.
Code Talker is intended to power sites and applications that use various procurement codes for federal solicitations and support industry and government interactions. In one demo of the tool, it lets users find NAICS codes that match keyword descriptions, which could help business owners in categorizing their businesses.
Beckley is a search index and API server for anyone requiring basic, fast search of highly curated content. Named after John Beckley, the first Librarian of Congress, the idea is to allow non-developers to easily create a list of URLs and related info to be included in a siloed search index.
PriceHistoryGUI allows government buyers to research actual prices paid in order to lower the price they pay for goods and services. Individual transactions can be selected by "drag 'n drop" into portfolios, which can then be imported into a text editor to document market research. Within the federal government, this software uses data which is not available for public usage, but the code is in the public domain.