Federalist

Building and hosting secure, scalable, easy to edit websites should be fast and cheap. In government, it isn’t. Let’s build an open source platform to solve that.

The Problem

• Cheap to distribute, expensive to publish
• Diverse requirements, sharing is hard
• Each agency certifies each of its sites (each time)
• Popular solutions do too much

The Solution

• Small pieces loosely joined
• Forkable templates
• Universal content editor
• Reusable publishing infrastructure

HealthCare.Gov was originally built in a garage

Washington Post

This new flagship federal .gov website is "open by design, open by default." That's a huge win for the American people.

The Atlantic

• > 2,000 pages
• 2 servers (one backup)
• (planned on 32 for Wordpress)
• > 250,000 concurrent users
• 0% downtime

The scrappy team used principles of "agile development," a rapid and lean style that’s been en vogue in Silicon Valley the past few years... Healthcare.gov, part one, was lauded for nailing both form and function "in a decidedly 21st-century way: cheaper, faster and scalable, using open source tools and open standards"

The Verge

Open Source

• Prose
• Jekyll-Hook
• Jekyll-Google-Analytics
• Best practices documented (DigitalGov.gov)

Sustainability

• Open source platform (.org vs .com)
• Pay for what you use
• Share in economy of scale

Our advantage

• The team
• The tools
• The experience

Getting it done

• Fit into existing projects
• Pilot with 18F and GSA sites
• Use Open Opportunities network for early adopters

Budget

• Initial product team: $125,600
  • product lead, two devs, one design, one research / sales
• Tech: $6,840 / year
• On-going: $333,400 / year (recoverable)
• Agile development == schedule / budget flex

$465,840