
Help Us Create vets.gov - brandonb
https://www.vets.gov/2015/11/11/why-we-are-designing-in-beta.html
======
brandonb
FYI, the new vets.gov is a collaboration between the US Digital Service, one
of the startups that came out of healthcare.gov (Ad Hoc LLC), the VA, and
others:

    
    
      https://adhocteam.us/
    
      https://www.whitehouse.gov/digital/united-states-digital-service
    
      https://www.fastcompany.com/3046756/obama-and-his-geeks
    

If anybody has questions, I know there are USDS and Ad Hoc people who read HN.

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Someone1234
I wonder if the US Digital Service will survive after the next president takes
office? Do they have a federal mandate at this point or do they operate at the
pleasure of Obama in particular? For example if a Republican took office would
that person have to go out of their way to keep or ditch the services?

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dragonwriter
As I understand it, USDS is in the Executive Office of the President and would
be very easy for a new President to dismantle, but its counsin 18F in GSA I
slightly more secure (obviously, _nothing_ in federal government is secure
against strong enough political will against it.)

~~~
toomuchtodo
What would happen to USDS federal government employees with a two year
contract?

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dragonwriter
As I understand, and I could be wrong, they have a limited term civil service
appointment, not a contract for a fixed term; this is a maximum period for
which they can be in a position, not a set time for which employment is
promised.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Interesting. Thanks for the reply!

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balls187
For a second, I thought that this was going to be an open source project and I
was excited to be able to contribute.

~~~
kingkilr
[https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/vets-
websi...](https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/vets-website) :-)

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sbuccini
Is there any way those of us who are more experienced on the backend can help
out?

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llimllib
hmmm, one thing we could really use is some tests. Maybe you could write some
simple capybara/rspec or equivalent integration tests for the site, just to
make sure that its parts are functioning correctly?

~~~
joealba
Since this is a Jekyll site, I'm not sure what we could wrap tests around. The
beauty of the static site generator is that it just always works -- at least
as far as the html content is concerned.

Is there a specific javascript feature or interactive feature that you'd like
help with testing?

~~~
llimllib
It does work great! We've gotten this far without them. But it makes me
nervous.

I'd like to have a few smoke tests to guard against things like:

* accidental deletion of pages

* accidental removal of header/footer/important elements

* proper 508 compliance

* valid HTML/JS/CSS (and probably lint all those things too)

Also the facility locator is a fair-sized hunk of JS I wrote that needs tests.

edit: also, in the future there will surely be more dynamic parts to the site,
so getting a framework in place for tests will both save work and raise the
expectation of quality

~~~
zaroth
It's more like you want a linter with custom rules for how you think a page
should look. Actually, it's impressive to create the entire site with only
content and simple layout. It's interesting there isn't a better way to manage
and edit all that content...

508 Compliance is another interesting point. Open source scanner to assess if
a page complies? It's another linter, it has to look at the html. I don't know
much about 508 but I'm going to say from a quick look at your <html> that it's
as clean as you could possibly hope for, and I would expect that latest screen
reading tools would be able to navigate it. If that's not the case it says
more about the particular reading tool than the website.

The facility locator! That was interesting, the default state is everything
selected, please flip it to everything deselected. I haven't tried it out more
because it overloaded ;-)

Benefits comparison tool also looks like it has a pretty big data set behind
it, that was probably cool to develop.

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dccoolgai
It doesn't look too bad... wonder how many millions of dollars it cost to set
up?

~~~
remarkEon
I understand the cynicism but....a lot of people I know have dealt with a lot
of VA incompetence (myself included). This is a necessary and productive step
in the right direction.

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err4nt
Its titled 'Help us create vets.gov' and I don't see any call to action where
I can contribute or find out more.

What sort of help are they looking for: content feedback, or hands-on stuff
like front-end code?

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MarinaMartin
There's a lightbulb in the bottom right you can click to give feedback. We
have already gotten feedback that it's a little hard to find so we will fix
that in the next day or so! And if you're a coder we would love comments and
PRs in Github.

~~~
err4nt
Im a front-end coder, non-American, but with lots of US family. I have been so
excited about the recent web frameworks and resources being created for US gov
services and if there was ever a project guaranteed to affect the lives of
millions - this is it!

I specialize in responsive styling, and building self-responsive content
blocks that can displayed or embedded in any layout or page. Im not sure where
to get started sending PRs from the wild - is there a roadmap explaining what
help is needed most, or where my skills could be put to best use?

