What 18F means to me

One year ago, I started a new job with the Maryland Department of Labor. I had worked for startups, for a university, for museums and other nonprofits, for myself – but never before for a government. I didn’t fully understand what it means to be a government employee (nor do I profess to know it all today, a mere 365 days later), but I was encouraged and even enthused by the examples before me in the civic tech world.

Some folx – my new boss, soon-to-be coworkers – tried to convey what was different about government work. Their comments ranged from the motivating and idealistic to some bog-standard complaints about bureaucracy. A soon-to-be-former coworker recommend Cyd Harrell’s A Civic Technologist’s Practice Guide (thanks, Jonny), which I read in fits and starts over my first six months on the job in an attempt to better understand this new environment.

Even for everything I didn’t know then and still don’t know, what I did get about the job was the potential impact. For this job specifically, where my work could serve Maryland’s 2.8 million workers, but also broadly for civic tech.

And that’s because so many amazing civic technologists before me worked in the open, sharing their learnings, their designs and their code with the community. The work shared by government teams like 18F and the UK’s Government Digital Services were hugely inspiring to me, particularly in roles where I was the sole front-end and accessibility engineer on a team and desparate to do right by our users. I regularly referred to the documents and components of USWDS and the GOV.UK Design System both in my work and in evangelizing design systems and accessibility to my teams.

This made it all the more meaningful that in my new role I was going to work directly with a previous 18F employee and learn directly from her experience. Then, in July, our team onboarded a group of engineers, designers and a product manager from 18F, and I got to work with them directly as teammates. This combination of experiences has been so very influential to me – it was a huge privilege to learn from their vast experiences in a variety of government programs and a joy to be bolstered by their pragmatic idealism.

The team from 18F I worked with was deeply caring – for our mission and goals, for the sustainability of our Maryland team and for me as a leader. They were strong experts and valuable teammates.

I use the past tense, of coure, because the federal government shuttered 18F just this month. For our project, this was frustrating and chaotic as we had no notice and were not able to properly handoff work or offboard folx. For myself and my team, it was distressing to lose teammates overnight and to see them treated so poorly. And professionally – it’s been shocking to see a pillar of civic tech, responsible for modernizing systems like the IRS and user authentication, eliminated and for their work to be deleted from the web.

The folx who made up 18F created the systems and documents that first made me aware of the impact and value in government service for a technologist like me. Folx who worked at 18F inspired me directly, recruiting me into state government. My career prior to government service was made better by their work and contributions, and my public sector career might not even exist without 18F.

And I know I’m not alone in this. In my frustration and sadness, that’s the light that guides me forward – I know there’s many more folx like me out there, who were never part of the organization, yet were influenced and inspired by it. I hope we’re also seen as part of 18F’s impact, and 18F deserves to be credited with our good works.