Healthcare.gov: Code by the People, for the People, Released Back to the People

A link to the GitHub source: https://github.com/CMSgov/healthcare.gov

(The article buries the link to the page with the link: https://www.healthcare.gov/developers )

The folks at Development Seed are doing really awesome work between Prose and MapBox and it's great to see them get some recognition for it.

Also a great plug for Jekyll in general. While there can certainly be more worrisome factors than cost for a site, site performance should be one of the most important issues when launching. By completely getting rid of a backing database, page lookup times can be reduced dramatically. As Prose continues to mature, it's getting more and more flexible by the day. Just last week they implemented an extensible "tagging" feature for posts: https://github.com/prose/prose/issues/464.

In case you haven't noticed, I'm a fan. Kudos to dev seed and big props to the White House team for the willingness to move away from Drupal.

Agreed - this is great work and I'm really happy to see Government moving in this direction. Key point for Federal leadership here (in addition to the cost savings) are that a small team of developers and designers working together using open source tools can build great products that scale to meet the demands of government. Helps that the team seems very capable!

It's a risk for any CIO / CTO to kick off a project like this in government, and I applaud HHS for taking the step.

The use of Jekyll (or any static HTML generator) is a really huge, positive conceptual step. I mean, we can now make edits -- in Markdown -- to individual blog posts and submit pull requests.

Whether they actually honor those requests* is another thing, but this is a really cool step. Even the use of Markdown means that the site/content designers have to really work to obfuscate the content with unnecessary modules/widgets/etc.

Regardless of the merits of the administration's policies and initiatives, I hope this catches on. 95% of the government websites I've seen, from city council to federal, could be rendered in static HTML...and maintained much more easily.

* edit: Only one way to find out: https://github.com/dannguyen/healthcare.gov/commit/6438498ea...

So, does this mean they learned some important lessons from the $18 million recover.gov site?

As for Percussion, is the Sivak person saying that it takes a month to make a simple navigation change? Is this really about the CMS or the red tape involved in getting approval to make the change?