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Articles by Michelle Hertzfeld
18F’s best practices for making distributed teams work
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.
Every Sufficiently Large Open Dataset...
Data.gov publishes free of charge and with no strings attached 87,000 different datasets. Some big datasets, like satellite images and weather data, have become the basis of entire industries, and need no promotion. Most datasets are not so exciting. Many are small, some contain errors, most need interpretation, and all require searching. But every dataset, even the most boring, deserves a little love and attention from a curator who catalogs it and makes it easier to understand.
MarineCadastre.gov - Data.gov
MarineCadastre.gov is a joint Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) initiative that provides authoritative data to meet the needs of the offshore energy and marine planning communities. The website provides access to authoritative data from multiple agencies, including offshore boundaries and physical, biological, ocean use, and cultural information.
National Water Information System
The National Water Information System provides access to water-resources data collected at approximately 1.5 million sites in all 50 States, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.
AirAtlas: Air Quality in National Parks
AirAtlas is a series of web maps that show estimated air quality statistics for atmospheric deposition, ozone, and visibility in the contiguous U.S. The maps also show National Park Service (NPS) units and monitoring locations for each of those air pollutant categories. Specific estimates of each statistic are available for every NPS unit in the contiguous U.S.
Everything you ever wanted to know about earthquakes? Yeah, we've got that.
The USGS Earthquake Hazards program has everything you ever wanted to know about earthquakes and more — from maps to tips to trivia to data in a multitude of formats, serving everyone from your neighbor to your neighborhood scientist. The USGS locates about 50 earthquakes each day and 20,000 a year, and 75 million Americans in 39 states live in places that are at risk of earthquakes. Where do you live?
Space Weather: Live from Boulder, Colorado
NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) monitors and forecasts space weather in real-time, providing measurements of magnetic fields, radiation, and other matter in space 24 hours a day from their offices in Boulder, Colorado. On their website, you can sign up for alerts and notices about space weather events, get info on space weather happening right now, and learn about NOAA space weather data and data products.
Sunshine Week: Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative Event
A few months ago we, along with our partners at the Department of the Interior, launched a new website showing the U.S.’s commitment to the international Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). Today, 18F joins the Departments of the Interior and State at General Assembly DC to celebrate Sunshine Week and the progress we made together in shedding light on public data.
Taking control of our website with Jekyll and webhooks
A few of us here recently took a bit of time to drastically rework 18F's main website and blog — what you're reading right now — and take it fully into our own hands. It may not look a lot different on the surface, but we made some serious infrastructure changes. Namely, we migrated the site to Jekyll, and left Tumblr behind by moving the blog inside to join it. We also set up automatic deployment to staging and live sites, using GitHub's webhook system.
User-centered design at 18F: a design studio for natural resource revenues
On July 28, 18F kicked off a new project with the Department of the Interior’s Office of Natural Resources Revenue (ONRR). Later this year, ONRR will be launching a new website — originally prototyped by Round 2 Presidential Innovation Fellow Michelle Hertzfeld — to facilitate national and international conversation around U.S. extractive industries revenue.
The Encasement Strategy: On Legacy Systems and the Importance of APIs
by Robert L. Read, PhD with illustrations by Michelle Hertzfeld In 1986 a nuclear reactor known as Chernobyl released harmful radioactivity which spread over much of the western USSR and Europe. The core of this reactor remains a glowing, ineradicable mass of deadly radioactive lava in the middle of a large Exclusion Zone unfit for human habitation. The Chernobyl reactor core could not be removed. It was and is too big, too hot, and there is no where for it to go.
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