_posts/2016-03-18-18f-year-two-by-the-numbers.md
---
title: "18F year two: By the numbers"
date: 2016-03-18 13:50
authors:
- boone
tags:
- second anniversary
excerpt: "18F turned two years old this past Saturday, and we thought we’d take
the opportunity to reflect on how our organization has grown and
progressed in the last 12 months. Our team, our work, and even this blog
have grown and diversified since March 19, 2015. Here are a few key
statistics to show how."
description: "18F turned two years old this past Saturday, and we thought we’d take
the opportunity to reflect on how our organization has grown and
progressed in the last 12 months. Our team, our work, and even this blog
have grown and diversified since March 19, 2015. Here are a few key
statistics to show how."
image:
---
18F turns two years old on Saturday, and we thought we’d take
the opportunity to reflect on how our organization has grown and
progressed in the last 12 months. Our team, our work, and even this blog
have grown and diversified since March 19, 2015. Here are a few key
statistics to show how:
Our work
--------
18F is funded out of the [acquisition services
fund](http://www.gsa.gov/portal/content/182815) and we sign agreements
with partner agencies to recover our costs. In the last 12 months:
- We signed **116 agreements for new work** with partner agencies
- We continued or modified **8 agreements**
- **25 unique agencies** in the federal government have worked with 18F
- **13 agreements** were signed for work in the Presidential Innovation Fellowship program
Our team is committed to building human-centered tools and applications
for the public. As part of that commitment we spent **more than 700
person-hours talking to real people who will use our products.** Last
year we reported how many people we talked to, but reporting person
hours gets at a deeper dimension of our research that we think is more
valuable. Sometimes talking to one person for two hours is more valuable
than talking to eight people for 15 minutes.
Our work is open source. Here are some numbers about our **521
repositories** on GitHub:
- Most popular project: [**The Draft U.S. Web Design Standards**](https://github.com/18F/web-design-standards) with **323 forks** and **2,942 stars**
- **106 repos** forked by 18F
- **7 18F employees** contributed code upstream to projects we use.
- At least **47 tools** developed by 18F employees are available on a package manager like [rubygems](https://rubygems.org), [npm](https://www.npmjs.com/), or [PyPI](https://pypi.python.org/pypi).
One of our biggest initiatives this year was helping change the way the
government buys technology. The most visible of that work was the Agile
BPA and our micro-purchasing experiments, done in partnership with
General Service Administration’s Federal Acquisition Service in the
[Pacific Rim Region](http://www.gsa.gov/portal/content/104695),
headquartered in San Francisco.
- **200 companies competed** across all three pools
- **40 prototypes** submitted for pool three were considered exceptional by our review team
- **17 companies** were ultimately awarded space in pool three
- **22 vendors** put in **208 total bids** across the **22 reverse auctions** hosted by 18F
- **Three auctions** sold to a bidder for $1
- **19 bids** were made on the most competitive auction
- **A few hours**: the fastest time it took to turn around a winning auction
- **2 reverse auctions** done on behalf of a client: GSA’s FedRamp and the Federal Acquisition Service
Our team
--------
[18F started](https://18f.gsa.gov/2014/03/19/hello-world-we-are-18f/)
as a team of 15 people in DC. [On our first
birthday](https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/03/19/18f-by-the-numbers/), we had
76 employees in 11 cities. In the last 12 months we continued to hire
public servants around the country to join our team. Here’s what we look
like today:
- **21 new** [**Presidential Innovation Fellows**](https://presidentialinnovationfellows.gov/)
- **97 new 18F team members,** bringing our team to a total size of **178**
- [We are hiring](https://join.18f.gov) at a rate of **25 new employees per quarter**
- We have staff in **30 cities** [**across the country**](https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/10/15/best-practices-for-distributed-teams/)
- **We have four offices** in DC, San Francisco, New York, and Chicago
- **43 percent** of our staff works in DC, **19 percent** in San Francisco, **eight percent** in Chicago, and **seven percent** in New York
- The remaining **23 percent of the team works remotely** from one of the following cities:
- Atlanta, GA
- Austin, TX
- Boston, MA
- Carrboro, NC
- Charlottesville, VA
- Cincinnati, OH
- Clinton, MS
- Davis, CA
- Dayton, OH
- Denver, CO
- Durham, NC
- Jackson, WY
- Lawrence, KS
- Los Angeles, CA
- Northampton, MA
- Minneapolis, MN
- Philadelphia, PA
- Pittsburgh, PA
- Portland, OR
- Raleigh, NC
- Roanoke, VA
- Richmond, VA
- Santa Barbara, CA
- San Diego, CA
- Seattle, WA
- St. Louis, MO
- Tucson, AZ
Outreach
--------
We wrote 66 blog posts our first year. This blog remains an important
forum for engaging with our users, other federal agencies, and the
public about our products. This year was an even bigger year for us:
- **We wrote 140 new posts**, which is a **112 percent** increase from last year
- **Our audience grew, too.** Every month we had more readers than that last, with a mean year-on-year pageview growth rate of **577 percent**
- September was our biggest month with **79,102 pageviews, that’s a 1,272 percent growth** compared to September 2014
In addition to the blog, we launched our newsletter in June 2015 with
4,000 subscribers. Over time we’ve grown that to 6,035. And in case
you’d like to subscribe, you can do that at the bottom of this post.