gsa-tts/10x-data-exchange

What we're up to: A demo

A simple way to help users navigate and transfer their data between government sites, without requiring agency-to-agency data-sharing.

We're building the digital version of a user grabbing a document from one office, receiving good directions, and walking it down to the street to different office. Our approach makes it possible to get this done online in a few clicks without prior knowledge of where the docs or data are stored, and without incurring the privacy and security costs of transmitting data directly from one agency to another.

For users: We're trying to deliver an experience that feels like, "Do you need to get a doc from another agency? Just keep clicking "yes", and after 6-10 clicks it'll be done and you'll be back where you started and ready to move on."

For agencies: We aim to help agencies deliver this user experience, without needing a data-sharing agreement, and with minimal integration—all an agency has to do is add links and url params to existing web pages.

Demo:

DataExchangeDemo1.mp4

Here's what's new about it:

How you can help:

We're looking for pilot partners to help test this approach.

We’re hoping to find a situation where:

• Two systems need the same data but for compliance reasons are not connected.
• Data is transferred between the two systems via a manual process—potentially even by a user downloading a file from one system and then manually uploading it to another.
• The risk of failure is fairly low; this isn’t PII or mission-critical data transfer. Perhaps the users are federal employees rather than members of the public.

Can you think of a situation like this? Are you the system owner for a system that’s involved in a situation like this? If so, please contact the 10x team working on this idea: [email protected] and [email protected]

Devs click here 🚀

10x-data-exchange's Issues

Investigate pushing params from A to B and surviving a login to agency B (is Login functionality missing? Implementation problem on our end?)

Create two test servers

We are trying to learn if one of our ideas for data exchange is allowable in browsers, and if it runs into rules guarding against XSS attacks.

Set up two servers on two different ports, and assign them different domains in hosts file.

Use this python flask template.

Make a little GET endpoint that exposes a file on one server, and a button to fetch the file on the other server.

Does the user need to actually land on an agency B page?

Can we just send them straight back to agency A with everything they need?

Can we automatically/immediately send them back with:

• A filepath to a new file in their local device storage?
• A uri to a json blob in local browser storage somewhere? Cookies?

What are our options for passing different types of data from Agency B back to Agency A?

• Paths to local disk storage, i.e. Downloads folder?
• Browser-based ephemeral storage (cookies, possibly other things)?
• Serializing things into url params (yuck)?

Create a workflow where the two existing servers have login authentication via two different sandbox providers

Mobile?!

At some point soon it probably makes sense to transition this project to a mobile-first stance.

Open questions:

• Is the current demo minimally-viable on mobile?
• How do we define viability for a mobile experience (will depend on the breadth of options we discover in --> #11 )
• What might a blue sky experience look like on mobile?

Create agenda for 2nd convo with Login

• Param pushing issue (if it actually exists)
• Deeper dive into what a UID translation layer could provide
• Show the demo and leave time for brainstorming
• What else?

Get login IDV partners list

Put list here.