(ˌpaɪəˈnɪərɪŋ ˈspɪrɪt ) noun. a willingness to endure hardship in order to explore new places or try out new things 

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Of upstart entrepots and dying empires

Kicking off the New Year, I started reading City of Fortune, a wonderful history of Venice recommended by Venkatesh Rao and part of his 2025 Contraptions book club. It's great history, full of the hubris of a dying empire and the rise of scrappy literal swamp dwellers who forge a trading empire with grit and gumption. The latter of course is the now esteemed City of Venice. The book provides a fascinating history of the political economy and history that led to the rise of a powerful city sta...

#city#future#governance#reflections#meditations#venice#byzantines
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Building 10x more state capacity to address megafires and climate-proof California

With increasingly intense megafires, Michael Wara, a Stanford based fire and climate expert, has presciently called for a new state agency focused on proactive action to mitigate catastrophic fires before they happen since 2020. That's an excellent idea and I'd note we don't need a new competing center complete with competing turf battles and increased coordination headwinds. Nor do we need a specialized hyper-focused plan producing shop that results in reports that sit on shelves. What we do...

#megafire#california#state#capacity#analytics#digital
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The little cognitive loads that contribute to a crisis

One thing I've been thinking a lot about the last 42 hours is the street sweeping signs. That's sort of silly since I've been helping family members evacuate and there's a generational climate crisis happening. A decade ago, I remember there was a thought that those would be digitized and protocolized as part of Coord Curb's API, a Google backed next generation approach to "smart" cities. That didn't really take off though it's a big little thing. It's yet another thing to worry about moving ...

#smart#city#sustainble#street#sweeping
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The invisible cost of the state capacity crisis is increasingly invisible no longer

UPDATE: In the Pacific Palisades, fire hydrants ran dry around 3 AM last night. "The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP) confirmed they have received water shortage reports but could not confirm how many hydrants are effected." One of the saddest parts of working on public technology projects is seeing 1) incredible world class talent want to tackle important public problems like the climate crisis and 2) the struggle at best for the public sector to deploy that talent. In the ear...

#climate#crisis#state#capacity#reform#fire#la
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The lost art of planning

Happy New Year everyone! Time for type A people to make a long list of overambitious goals and resolutions that’ll be abandoned in a month or two. 😛 That whole exercise reminds me of the sad state of public planning, particularly in the US. Take a city, any city or municipal government therein, and you’ll find oodles of plans on their website. Long, shiny and lots of consultant hours went into those static pdfs. Yet ask a random manager from one of those organizations what they’re specifical...

#planning#frontier#government#new_years#data#forecasting#analytics#digital#transformation#cat
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Pioneering Spirit | First Year Roundup and Super Short Reader Survey

Dear Reader, It's been a year! I really enjoyed writing more and hoped you enjoy reading. This blog is still early and very much a work in progress so I hope you please do share your feedback for improvement in the comments below or the link here -- whatever is easier. 2024 stayed on brand for the past decade and stayed weird. Looking at the folly of our current times, an era that echoes elite failures like the sleepwalking into world war one, I wrote a review of Barbara Tuchman's magisterial...

#annual#roundup#first_year#survey#blog
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The need to employ and empower expertise inside government to actually deliver results

Below are a pair of excellent excerpts from recently released reports. Both are well worth reading in full. "The folly of skimping on internal core competence is well established in many domains. One paper by Zachary Liscow of Yale finds a remarkable correlation between the staffing levels of state departments of transportation and the per-mile construction cost of highways: increasing employment by one person per thousand in a population reduces costs by 26 percent.28 When there is insuffici...

#cat#state#capacity#digital#government
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What if... we built truly digitally native public institutions from the ground up

O1.5 decades ago, Code for America launched it's flagship fellowship. Featuring a who's who cast of tech industry luminaries like the US Federal CTO, Twitter Co-Founder and Mark Zuckerberg, the short video harkens back to an earlier, more idealistic age. (Mark then was a golden boy of American innovation, rather than the battle scarred CEO of a company often likened to the tobacco companies.) It also brings a spirit that's well worth remembering. The series of tech icons ask "what if" best in...

#civic#tech#cfa#digital#government#institutions
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Review: Tom Kalil on Institutions for Innovation

Tom Kalil, a pivotal science policy appointee in the Clinton and Obama administrations, recently went on the Hear This Idea podcast, a node in the Effective Altruist network.

#innovations#institutions#metascience#policy#dinosaurs
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Introducing the California Alternative Transformation (CAT) principles for moar efficient, effective and imaginative government operations v0.1

The Meme Lords are rallying, with the DOGE Techno King and his digital court scheming their next big gambit. The internet's good citizens face a choice: cheer from the sidelines or chart a better path. Let's talk CATs, not DOGE.From our AI Oracles: “Here’s an image of a regal Shiba Inu wielding a scepter and playfully smashing the Capitol.”Putting the future of American government in the hands of a self-styled “Techno-King” seems, uh, mildly antithetical to the spirit of 1776. Not to mention ...

#doge#cat#us#future#america#gov_ops#government#digital#transformation