

The U.S. Digital Services Playbook - ondrae
https://github.com/whitehouse/playbook

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8ig8
Committer is looking forward to getting committed...

[https://github.com/WhiteHouse/playbook/blob/gh-
pages/assets/...](https://github.com/WhiteHouse/playbook/blob/gh-
pages/assets/sass/styles.css.scss#L523-527)

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aptwebapps
Thought that you were saying they were going to be institutionalized ...

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calpaterson
It's interesting to compare
[http://playbook.cio.gov/](http://playbook.cio.gov/) to
[https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/digital-by-
default](https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/digital-by-default)

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projectileboy
This seems well done. And although it probably sounds pedestrian to most of
us, this seems like an awfully big step coming from the U.S. government. Now
the question is whether or not any agencies will actually follow any of this
sage advice.

As a snarky aside, it would be nice if the Obama administration would
themselves follow rule #13, and "default to open".

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PantaloonFlames
The key thing is, there are 3 bazillion developers and techies sprinkled all
throughout the US Govt. This playbook provides all of them a common base form
which to start. For that reason, it's really valuable.

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tanjk
Most of the actions in this list are not achievable because of Departmental
CIO policies.

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acdha
That's why this is actually important: when the President of the United States
announces a major push to improve government IT and publishes a policy guide
like this, it creates a shelter for all of the people working on the inside
who want to do things differently. Nothing is going to improve until the
environment changes so that departmental CIO has to justify sticking with
waterfall, overpaying for servers, delaying projects rather than using a
different approach, etc.

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tanjk
It does make more sense as instructions from the US CIO to Departmental and
Agency CIOs, because those are the people preventing anyone from operating on
anything as modern as they describe. My agency's Washington Office fixers have
us on IE8 for the foreseeable and I'm not allowed to use ssl without a tech
approval.

"Be sure and have a Budget Officer at your meeting!"

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acdha
Oh, believe me, I can relate. The difference is that now I can see the
waterfail faction starting to realize they need to change. Once you get a few
data points for comparison, it becomes hard to maintain that the status quo is
maintainable.

The trick is really to turn it into an economic argument. Figure out how to
get the budget officer to start asking why project Y requires servers + staff
at an order of magnitude greater than project X and the pressure starts
shifting.

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imatworkyo
This is also kind of scary. Imagine what kind of havoc the government could
cause if it was actually efficient at what it does.

