This week, I co-authored a blog post for the 18F blog, entitled: When a micro-purchase doesn’t work out, we try to learn from it. It discussed a thing that is rarely discussed in government: failure. Here’s the opening graf:

Two months ago, the 18F acquisitions team ran a public micro-purchase auction to find a vendor to develop a small new feature for 18F’s cloud.gov, and for the first time after several successful micro-purchases for other products, the contracted vendor didn’t deliver the code on time. This was very interesting to us — we’re early in the life of the micro-purchase platform, and we believe that failure is a great way to learn. In the spirit of experimentation and sharing our lessons, here’s how we went about analyzing this, and here’s what we learned.

I encourage you to read it!