The American people expect to interact with government through digital channels such as websites, email, and mobile applications. By building better digital services that meet the needs of the people that use our services, we can make the delivery of our policy and programs more effective.
One way to advance smarter digital service delivery is by putting the right processes and practices in place to drive outcomes and accountability and allow people and companies to do their best work. The Digital Services Playbook and the TechFAR Handbook document these best practices and processes:
- The Digital Services Playbook identifies a series of “plays” drawn from successful best practices from the private sector and government that, if followed together, will help government build effective digital services. The plays outline an approach to delivering services that increases our ability to be flexible, iterative and, most importantly, to focus on the needs of the people that use our services.
- The TechFAR Handbook highlights the flexibilities in the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) that can help agencies implement “plays” from the Playbook that would be accomplished with acquisition support – with a particular focus on how to use contractors to support an iterative, customer-driven software development process, as is routinely done in the private sector.
We encourage your feedback and suggestions on these documents. Content and feature suggestions and discussions are welcome via GitHub Issues. You may also propose changes to the content directly by submitting a pull request.
Feedback collected before September 1, 2014 will be incorporated into the next release of the Digital Services Playbook and the TechFAR Handbook.
The Playbook and the TechFAR Handbook are compiled from Markdown files using Jekyll. To propose a specific change, you can submit a pull request with your change to one of these source Markdown files. The Plays from the Playbook are available in the _plays folder, while the TechFAR is contained in this markdown file.
You can also use Github's in-browser editing feature to make an edit to one of these Markdown files and submit your change for consideration without needing to install any additional software.
To run the site locally on your own computer (most helpful for previewing your own changes), you will need to install Jekyll and other dependencies:
If you don't already have Ruby and Bundler installed, follow the first two steps in these Jekyll installation instructions.
Next, fork this repository and clone it on your computer.
Navigate to the folder on your computer, and run the command $ bundle install at the command line prompt.
To run the site locally, run jekyll serve --watch, then visit http://localhost:4000/ in your browser to preview the site.
This project uses Sass for managing its style sheets. If you would like to make changes to the site's styles, you should edit the assets/sass/styles.css.scss file.
Do not make changes to the styles.css file directly, as this file is auto-generated from the styles.css.scss file.
To compile changes in the styles.css.scss Sass file into a new styles.css file, you can run: $ sass --watch assets/sass/styles.css.scss:assets/css/styles.css. This command will watch for any changes you make to the Sass file and automatically update the CSS file, making it easy to check your work when you are running the site locally (see above).
As a work of the United States Government, this project is in the public domain within the United States.
Additionally, we waive copyright and related rights in the work worldwide through the CC0 1.0 Universal public domain dedication.