In the 19th century, one of the largest municipal challenges facing American cities was horse manure. In New York alone, over 100,000 horses produced an estimated 2.5 million pounds of manure daily.
Cities deployed vast public resources to manage this avalanche of waste. It was the defining logistical crisis of the age — until the automobile arrived, and with it, an entirely new paradigm of urban transport.
Now imagine if, on the eve of that shift, civic leaders had focused all their efforts on designing a better manure-tracking dashboard. That’s what too much of civic tech has become today.
We are still designing digital tools for institutions built for a bygone era. We are digitizing dung management.
ARGO was launched a decade ago with the belief that we are living through a transformation in city government operations as profound as the shift from agrarian life to the industrial era. As the ARGO Manifesto notes:
“The digital revolution has transformed how we live, work and play while most government operations would be eerily similar to a time travel from the early to mid-twentieth century.”
This isn’t about making forms fillable PDFs or adding chatbots to broken workflows. It’s about shifting the very operating system of how public services are delivered.
We are building elegant interfaces for institutions and workflows designed for a century long past. We are optimizing compliance rituals. Shiny tools on top of broken processes.
We’re at the wrong layer.
Over the last decade, ARGO has experimented from that premise. We built prototypes:
A car, bike, or skateboard-mounted sensor to crowdsource road condition data. That was forked and redeployed in several cities.
A digital tool to connect professionals with teachers for in-classroom volunteering. That sparked a lot of IRL fun and web3 seeds.
The California Data Collaborative, a shared data infrastructure for water utilities, recently featured by the United Nations.
Through those adventures, we learned something important: technology may spark change, but protocols are what sustain it.
Streets still crumble because local, state, and federal layers each follow arcane, incompatible standards like the Pavement Condition Index — metrics that do more to justify inertia than prioritize repairs. And even when someone builds something better, innovation gets strangled.
One startup built a superior pothole detection tool. It was cheaper, faster, and more accurate. A megacorp bought it — and then killed it. Not because it didn’t work. But because it couldn’t fit into the tangled thicket of procurement rules and jurisdictional fragmentation that governs how we “manage” streets. Legacy contractors win, the public loses.
Today, 2.5 decades after Gov Works, twelve years after healthcare dot gov, and with a bazillion civic tech success stories, all the pieces are in place for reimagining basic services, breaking the consultant industrial complex that frustrates change, and boldly pioneering the future of cities.
Jen Pahlka, founder of Code for America, recently issued a call to the Abundance Network:
Map a process. Show us how things actually work. Not just what the official flowchart says, but the real decision points, detours, and gatekeepers. Share the user journey.
This is where transformation begins. When we see the system for what it is, we can imagine what it might become.
1. Map a Process. How do you permit an ADU in your city? Get a water meter turned on? Help a teacher bring in an outside expert? Show the real steps and user journey.
2. Redesign the Protocol. Not the app. The actual structure: roles, decision rights, trust checkpoints, and paths for escalation or exception.
3. Share It. Use the tag #CivicProtocolMapping. Post it on a blog, a GitHub repo, Warpcast, anywhere. We’re building a living library of civic protocols.
And to inspire you, consider this blog post from Krystof Litomisky:
“A Look at the DMV That Is, and the DMV That Should Be.”
Read it here.
It’s a firsthand account of navigating the DMV — a system riddled with broken appointment systems, confusing requirements, and bureaucratic silos. The post went viral and was shared within California’s Government Operations Agency. In a small but substantive way, it helped build momentum for a major transformation of the DMV’s digital services.
You can do this too. Your story, your diagram, your protocol redesign could be the spark that brings clarity to chaos — and momentum to long-needed change.
We’re standing in the same moment city governments faced when the first cars began to rattle down manure-laden streets.
Some tried to shovel faster.
Others built roads. And setup signage, painted lanes, and designed the million little protocols that make urban life with cars possible.
The choice is ours.
We stand on the CUSP of a potentially much larger shift in how we live, work and play together. Self driving horseless carriages offer one example.
Will we digitize the dung — or design the future?
Let a zillion new protocols bloom— and together let’s iteratively build a new City Operating System.[1]
— [A]pplied [R]esearch in [G]overnment [O]perations
[1] Note ARGO’s early advisor co-authored a great book on a new City O/S that’s worth checking out.
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