Development Seed

See the following -

Err Engine Down

David Auerbach | Slate | October 8, 2013

Of all the terrible websites I’ve seen, healthcare.gov ranks somewhere in the middle. It has been difficult if not impossible to sign up, and customer service has been inadequate. [...]  So healthcare.gov’s failures are not uncommon—they’re just exceptionally high-profile. Read More »

Four Key Trends Changing Digital Journalism And Society

Alex Howard | O'Reilly Radar | September 28, 2012

It’s not just a focus on data that connects the most recent class of Knight News Challenge winners. They all are part of a distributed civic media community that works on open source code, collects and improves data, and collaborates across media organizations. Read More »

HealthCare.Gov Was Originally Built In A Garage

Sarah Kliff | The Washington Post | October 9, 2013

You  may be surprised to learn that when you arrive at HealthCare.Gov the first page you see on the Web site was not built in a bland office park somewhere in Virginia. It was built in the District of Columbia. By a team of 12 engineers. Their offices are in a garage, and they wanted to use the site to buy themselves health insurance in 2014. Read More »

Healthcare.gov: Code Developed By The People And For The People, Released Back To The People

Alex Howard | The Atlantic | June 28, 2013

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

How We Build CMS-Free Websites

Dave Cole | Development Seed | July 27, 2012

It's been almost two years since Development Seed deliberately stopped building websites with Drupal and moved away from CMS-driven applications altogether. Since then, our recent blog posts about investing in Prose.io, rebuilding our own websites with Jekyll, creating the MapBox Map Site templates, and launching new client-sponsored projects like MIX Maps indicate the new approach we're taking. Read More »

Obamacare’s Open Source Project Lives On — Even After White House Kills It

Robert McMillan | Wired | October 22, 2013

Months before the ill fated launch of Healthcare.gov — the website built to give millions of Americans access to affordable health care — government officials were already describing it as something special. Read More »

Open-Source Everything: The Moral of the Healthcare.gov Debacle

Paul Ford | Business Week | October 16, 2013

The U.S. federal government, led by the executive branch, should make all taxpayer-funded software development open-sourced by default. In the short run, this would help to prevent the recurrence of problems like those that plague healthcare.gov. Longer term, it will lead to better, more secure software and could allow the government to deliver a range of services more effectively. And it would enrich democracy to boot. Read More »

White House to 'open source' Data.Gov as the Open Government Data Platform

Alex Howard | O'Reilly Radar | December 5, 2011

As 2011 comes to an end, there are 28 international open data platforms in the open government community. By the end of 2012, code from new "Data.gov-in-a-box" may help many more countries to stand up their own platforms. A partnership between the United States and India on open government has borne fruit: progress on making the open data platform Data.gov open source.

Read More »