_posts/2015-05-28-18F-guides.md
---
title: "18F Guides"
date: 2015-05-28
layout: post
authors:
- mbland
tags:
- how we work
- communication tools and practices
- guides
- product launch
excerpt: "While there's no substitute for personal instruction and mentorship, that effort scales far more effectively when there are clear, concise materials to introduce the
basics. 18F Guides aims to fill that
role for our young and growing team, and we hope it may be of use to
others as well."
description: "While there's no substitute for personal instruction and mentorship, that effort scales far more effectively when there are clear, concise materials to introduce the
basics. 18F Guides aims to fill that
role for our young and growing team, and we hope it may be of use to
others as well."
image: /assets/blog/18F-guides/18F-guides.png
---
Sometimes it's not enough to teach one person at a time to fish: There's
a whole hungry village in need of the skill. While there's no substitute
for personal instruction and mentorship, that effort scales far more
effectively when there are clear, concise materials to introduce the
basics. [18F Guides](https://pages.18f.gov/guides/) aims to fill that
role for our young and growing team, and we hope it may be of use to
others as well.
## Coalescing best practices
18F Guides aims to serve as the repository for best practices across 18F
project teams. None of the content is particularly original or
groundbreaking; however, organized well and cultivated over time through
our open source process, these documented practices should enable us to
share and apply knowledge across projects, allowing incremental
improvement as our experience grows. As our projects benefit from this
knowledge sharing, so will our partners and the people they serve.
The guides themselves exemplify our adherence to open source development
as a best practice. Not only is the source code and full text for all of
the guides published on GitHub, but most of them are based on the
[DOCter template](https://github.com/cfpb/DOCter) created by the
[Consumer Financial Protection Bureau](http://www.consumerfinance.gov/) (CFPB). Our canonical
adaptation of DOCter is contained in the [18F Guides Template](https://pages.18f.gov/guides-template/).
## Onboarding
These guides are especially useful to new team members, who need to get
up to speed quickly on the 18F way of doing things, for example:
handling [accessibility](https://pages.18f.gov/accessibility/) issues,
following [agile](https://pages.18f.gov/agile/) methodologies, writing
[well-tested](https://pages.18f.gov/automated-testing-playbook/) code.
New hires better understand the context of their work through
self-directed training and make productive contributions more quickly by
following established idioms. All team members are encouraged to suggest
improvements that benefit the rest of the organization, particularly
future new hires. Since all of the guides are public, a new team member
can begin getting familiar with how 18F works even before their start
date, if so motivated, and people considering whether they want to work
at 18F can get a glimpse into our process.
## Equipping digital service teams
Though these guides currently carry the 18F brand, the intention is to
spread the use and cultivation of the material throughout the broader
[U.S. Digital Service](https://wh.gov/usds/) effort. As new digital
service teams launch across government agencies and existing teams seek
to improve their current practices, the guides provide a
government-endorsed vehicle for knowledge sharing and skills
acquisition. The guides complement the [Digital Services Playbook](https://playbook.cio.gov) by providing teams detailed,
practical advice on how to implement the plays. Though these other teams
are welcome to fork their own copies and maintain them, we hope the
innovations these other teams develop will find their way into the
guides, to the benefit of all government teams using them.
## Inviting input from the broader industry
By developing this material in the open, we hope to encourage expert
review and contributions from members of the tech community outside of
government, furthering our goal of improving how government works
through increased civic engagement of tech specialists. We hope this
material and the means by which it is developed will attract new
recruits to 18F and the U.S. Digital Service in general, but for those
who are not inclined to make the full commitment, helping cultivate the
guides is a potentially **high-visibility, high-impact contribution to
government work that doesn’t require a major life change**.
Though the guides are all still incomplete, in true agile fashion, we
believe that by launching early and iterating we will incrementally
build a strong body of institutional knowledge, one that supports the
long-term health and productivity of 18F as an organization, and, as a
result, the long-term health and productivity of the federal government.
Visit [18F Guides](https://pages.18f.gov/guides/) now to peruse our
current state and start suggesting and submitting improvements!