Last week I learned about an alien life form.

Cyclothones float in the mid to deep waters of the ocean. These fragile small fish make up 100 billion to 1 trillion kg by biomass, approximately 10-100x the mass of all mammals, and play a critical role in the vertical transfer of nutrients in the ocean, making a home 200-1000 meters deep where the light of our modest star struggles and then finally fails to penetrate. Cyclothones have tiny bristle-like teeth that they use to strain plankton, somewhat akin as I understand to blue whales, an organism at the opposite end of the size spectrum.

This funny little fish served as the Harry Potter style house mascots and operating metaphor for a strange symposia on protocols I participated in last week.

Featuring professors in disciplines ranging from computer science to sociology, people calling in from time zones all over the world, this pop up experiment provided a nice mix of perspective shifting content and exercises to level up understanding of protocols, Cyclothone-like creatures that play critical roles yet float in the twilight zone of the proverbial oceans of interactions between people and technology that make up civilization.

Speaking of protocols at one levels feels obvious. Consider washing our hands, participating in a handshake, or queuing at a shop. Such actions feel banal. What is the point of studying such small things? One hope of studying protocols lies in making the unseen legible, leveraging patterns that lie across categories.

Small shifts can make a big difference. Handwashing was foundational for enabling what we now know as hospitals. Without that basic unit of cleanliness, medical treatment at a centralized location served more to distribute disease than increase health. (In the 19th century, those that could afford it would have doctors call at their homes.)

Handwashing also played a pivotal role in the recent Covid-19 epidemic. I remember hearing a survivalist focused mayor in the high dessert talk at length in February 2020 (before the lockdowns!) about the key parts of hands to wash and the bit that are frequently forgotten. The mnemonic to sing happy birthday to oneself is handy to not gloss over that small but important action.

Protocols also include more technical or sophisticated examples like HTTPS or climate treaties. Such larger scale systems include more atomic protocols and operate on top of other substructures like property rights for fiber optic cables or plants generating electricity. Similar to a recipe, protocols include rules and steps.

And like cooking, protocols include conventions that may or may not be written down. What’s key is that people and/or systems follow certain agreements so that they can reliably coordinate. We expect doctors to have clean hands when we step into a hospital just like we expect a friend to have washed their hands before handing us a piece of food.

Diving beyond a certain depth into this ocean, becoming protocol pilled in the internet speak that makes up this delightfully quirky crowd, provides a set of lenses that subtly shift how you see the world. Far beyond just learning about specific curios like cyclothones, protocol-thinking provides a tool for wrangling conceptually with oceans of largely invisible agreements that make civilized life possible.

Far more intriguingly for an aspiring doer-of-things like myself, protocols offer a useful toolkit for navigating the twilight zone between rules created long ago that no longer make sense and new possibilities for ordering everything from a household to an organization to a city. As our world navigates non-trivial shifts, that promise is certainly worth exploring.

Let me offer some examples.

In government digital modernization efforts, procurement functions as a Moby Dick-esque white whale for the field. Luminaries have pointed out the problems with current procurement practices at length. (TLDR rules were designed for a pre-digital era and the general accretion of rules upon rules means that policies designed to achieve one outcome often serve no purpose other than entrenching interests able to navigate that mountain-like pile of rules.) Presidential digital service teams have spun up whole alternative marketplaces for purchasing digital tools. Numerous startups have, uh, started.

I was catching up with a colleague who works in this field and we agreed that protocols provide an intriguing angle to address long standing challenges like procurement. “Build with, not for” is just a slogan. Agile isn’t the answer to everything. Every government institution like any organization has its own peculiarities. In my day job at a large government bureaucracy, protocol thinking has proved extremely useful in an organization-wide initiative to streamline our internal process. That effort is ongoing though there have been some initial existence proofs that change is possible and I am cautiously optimistic of a snowball effect.

Like cyclothones, an intricate scaffolding exists that needs increased visibility. Protocol studies provides a common vocabulary to describe what’s problematic about a specific process like procurement. We can speak of too many edge cases or a lack of clarity about the user path. The Kafka index proved a fan favorite at a protocol webinar kindly provided to our government organization pro-bono. And I am curious to use the protocol watching toolkit and many of the concepts learned over the last week to scout out potential achievable improvements to our procurement pipeline from soliciting vendors to storing past contracts in the archives.

Or consider the proverbial pothole.

For the last few months, I’ve been watching those gaps in the road pop up in the street in front of my house with fascination. Last Thursday a couple of fine folks from LA County public works kindly filled those potholes in and shared their number at their yard. I’m curious to understand public works’ protocols for mapping and prioritizing which potholes get fixed.

For context, once upon a time I helped launch a startup that build a mobile sensor and data processing stack to track street quality. That’s fancy way of saying we took pictures of the road with digital cameras and measured bumpiness. There have been numerous such efforts to count potholes over the years such as Mayor Garcetti’s blitz, the Oakland citizen’s vigilantes, Mayor Pete’s smart city efforts, a startup spun out of Carnegie Mellon, an R&D project out of a major management consulting firm,… the list goes on. Those shiny pilots haven’t though made a dent in the universe-sized systemic challenge of expensive aging infrastructure and compound O&M costs in America’s city streets.

I recently picked that pothole thread back up as a little hobby, submitting public records act requests to cities across these United States to ascertain how much cities spent surveying street quality and then fixing up their streets. The responses were pretty funny. Some sent back a helpful map. Some ignored the request which is suboptimal from an adherence to the letter of the law. My favorite though was the counter request for $2k for staff time to query various databases.

It’s easy to and many citizens understandably do get angry in the face of perceived intransigence. Absent ample time and ideally a lawyer, a humble citizen doesn’t really have much recourse. Yet having worked inside government, I can imagine that staff in that city has several legacy systems of record and data scattered across various places. Usually it’s not that staff is just exceptionally lazy or lack incentive.

In my experience, people believe in the value of public service and want to do the right thing. Usually it’s just that a combination of time and the accretion of Kafka-esque protocols that tie their hands in knots make even the most zealous idealist ultimately numb. From the staff perspective in that environment, my requests were likely perceived as ill posed in its generality and yet another task to do.

I’ve spent a long time pondering the pothole problem. Part of the underlying challenge is that public works staff swim in water not of their making. There’s a complicated ancient standards that govern how street quality is measured. In the US, the marble cake of government operations means decisions are fragmented across local, state, and federal agencies that allocate funds and actually fix potholes, complicated before you get to the blog of firms, industry associations and other outlets that informally coordinate pothole fixing.

Again making the visible more clear, helps articulate and understand the nature of such an entrenched challenge. Protocol studies has helped break some of my biases accrued over a decade of experience in that domain and also critically offers a toolkit to find leverage points in the pothole funding and fixing stack. Mapping coordinates of street defects, coordinating street cuts with other utilities, filling potholes, resurfacing or restructuring a street, deploying street hardware over trenching, along with with managerial, financial and information flows — all those operations flow through protocols, many of which are long overdue for an upgrade.

I like the example of city streets because it’s very, uh, grounded.

Seeing protocols write large, in all their cyclothone-like mass floating silenting through the twilight interstitial spaces, is like stumbling upon sentient dust mites, nothing scary but certainly surprising, something akin to the sort that pop up frequently in Studio Ghibli films like My Neighbor Totoro or Spirited Away. Below offers a short AI-assisted list of potential lines of inquiry related to cities operations, my particular jam:

• The rules, both explicit and informal, for how local schools interface with afterschool programs, libraries, and parent associations. Not the whole education system, not one classroom, but the woven middle.

• Examine how one open dataset (like LA’s measure of street quality, urban forests or bus schedules) is maintained. Who updates it, what standards exist, and how do private vendors interact with the protocol of release? Where do requirement stem from? (State reporting, Mayor / Council mandates, department management etc.)

• The routing protocol from a complaint (noise, graffiti, pothole) to the right department. Not the entire civic bureaucracy, not a single official, but the handoff chain in the middle.

• Run a controlled experiment where a neighborhood applies for a block party permit under two different rule sets — the existing process vs. a simplified prototype — and measure time, satisfaction, and compliance.

• The rules for how local schools interface with afterschool programs, libraries, and parent associations. Not the whole education system, not one classroom, but the woven middle.

• Conventions like giving up seats, forming queues, or tolerating subway buskers. They’re not laws, but they arbitrate claims of fairness and recognition in crowded, diverse spaces.

• State DOTs and city public works departments share standardized asphalt or concrete mixes (e.g. Caltrans Section 39). These protocols ensure any contractor can bid, while shaping material choices and maintenance cycles industry-wide.

• Small utilities often share accredited water testing labs. Procurement protocols at this level specify sampling frequency, chain-of-custody, and data reporting standards (e.g. Safe Drinking Water Act compliance). It’s not one utility’s RFP, but a shared practice across a region. With a shockingly large number of Californians lacking clean drinking water (>800k) and that enduring challenge globally, such protocols need reinforcing.

The way our government operates is a holdover from the industrial era. There’s bits and pieces of shiny pilots and widgets, but the underlying operating system is obviously increasingly obsolete. Watching those protocols bit by bit provides a path to illuminate new modes of operations that are more adaptive, digitally native and suited to our current situation.

The word obvious etymologically comes from the latin roots “ob” as in toward and “via” as in the way. The latin word obvius had the connotation in the way, easily met. Today as the world lurches from a long complacency and towards upheaval, protocols offer a clear step towards the path through our weird and wild times.

In a time of oracles and aliens, of accelerating AI and bold claims, protocol studies build on a long tradition stretching back to the beginning of civilization, an invisible critical mass like cyclothones that we can see the world anew with fresh eyes. Cheers to the protocols crew on a successful symposia and for those curious to learn more about they strange creatures hiding in plain site, check out the summer of protocols website.

Pioneering protocols for the next City O/S

Earlier this week a gov tech colleague in Colorado shared a sharp provocation: "government is software" That metaphor of government-as-software is certainly punchy. And it packs a kernel of truth. After all, the very word "computer" comes from banks of clerks doing calculations, and many of our bureaucracies are still evolutions of those clerical functions.

https://pioneeringspirit.xyz

Last week I learned about an alien life form.

Cyclothones float in the mid to deep waters of the ocean. These fragile small fish make up 100 billion to 1 trillion kg by biomass, approximately 10-100x the mass of all mammals, and play a critical role in the vertical transfer of nutrients in the ocean, making a home 200-1000 meters deep where the light of our modest star struggles and then finally fails to penetrate. Cyclothones have tiny bristle-like teeth that they use to strain plankton, somewhat akin as I understand to blue whales, an organism at the opposite end of the size spectrum.

This funny little fish served as the Harry Potter style house mascots and operating metaphor for a strange symposia on protocols I participated in last week.

Featuring professors in disciplines ranging from computer science to sociology, people calling in from time zones all over the world, this pop up experiment provided a nice mix of perspective shifting content and exercises to level up understanding of protocols, Cyclothone-like creatures that play critical roles yet float in the twilight zone of the proverbial oceans of interactions between people and technology that make up civilization.

Speaking of protocols at one levels feels obvious. Consider washing our hands, participating in a handshake, or queuing at a shop. Such actions feel banal. What is the point of studying such small things? One hope of studying protocols lies in making the unseen legible, leveraging patterns that lie across categories.

Small shifts can make a big difference. Handwashing was foundational for enabling what we now know as hospitals. Without that basic unit of cleanliness, medical treatment at a centralized location served more to distribute disease than increase health. (In the 19th century, those that could afford it would have doctors call at their homes.)

Handwashing also played a pivotal role in the recent Covid-19 epidemic. I remember hearing a survivalist focused mayor in the high dessert talk at length in February 2020 (before the lockdowns!) about the key parts of hands to wash and the bit that are frequently forgotten. The mnemonic to sing happy birthday to oneself is handy to not gloss over that small but important action.

Protocols also include more technical or sophisticated examples like HTTPS or climate treaties. Such larger scale systems include more atomic protocols and operate on top of other substructures like property rights for fiber optic cables or plants generating electricity. Similar to a recipe, protocols include rules and steps.

And like cooking, protocols include conventions that may or may not be written down. What’s key is that people and/or systems follow certain agreements so that they can reliably coordinate. We expect doctors to have clean hands when we step into a hospital just like we expect a friend to have washed their hands before handing us a piece of food.

Diving beyond a certain depth into this ocean, becoming protocol pilled in the internet speak that makes up this delightfully quirky crowd, provides a set of lenses that subtly shift how you see the world. Far beyond just learning about specific curios like cyclothones, protocol-thinking provides a tool for wrangling conceptually with oceans of largely invisible agreements that make civilized life possible.

Far more intriguingly for an aspiring doer-of-things like myself, protocols offer a useful toolkit for navigating the twilight zone between rules created long ago that no longer make sense and new possibilities for ordering everything from a household to an organization to a city. As our world navigates non-trivial shifts, that promise is certainly worth exploring.

Let me offer some examples.

In government digital modernization efforts, procurement functions as a Moby Dick-esque white whale for the field. Luminaries have pointed out the problems with current procurement practices at length. (TLDR rules were designed for a pre-digital era and the general accretion of rules upon rules means that policies designed to achieve one outcome often serve no purpose other than entrenching interests able to navigate that mountain-like pile of rules.) Presidential digital service teams have spun up whole alternative marketplaces for purchasing digital tools. Numerous startups have, uh, started.

I was catching up with a colleague who works in this field and we agreed that protocols provide an intriguing angle to address long standing challenges like procurement. “Build with, not for” is just a slogan. Agile isn’t the answer to everything. Every government institution like any organization has its own peculiarities. In my day job at a large government bureaucracy, protocol thinking has proved extremely useful in an organization-wide initiative to streamline our internal process. That effort is ongoing though there have been some initial existence proofs that change is possible and I am cautiously optimistic of a snowball effect.

Like cyclothones, an intricate scaffolding exists that needs increased visibility. Protocol studies provides a common vocabulary to describe what’s problematic about a specific process like procurement. We can speak of too many edge cases or a lack of clarity about the user path. The Kafka index proved a fan favorite at a protocol webinar kindly provided to our government organization pro-bono. And I am curious to use the protocol watching toolkit and many of the concepts learned over the last week to scout out potential achievable improvements to our procurement pipeline from soliciting vendors to storing past contracts in the archives.

Or consider the proverbial pothole.

For the last few months, I’ve been watching those gaps in the road pop up in the street in front of my house with fascination. Last Thursday a couple of fine folks from LA County public works kindly filled those potholes in and shared their number at their yard. I’m curious to understand public works’ protocols for mapping and prioritizing which potholes get fixed.

For context, once upon a time I helped launch a startup that build a mobile sensor and data processing stack to track street quality. That’s fancy way of saying we took pictures of the road with digital cameras and measured bumpiness. There have been numerous such efforts to count potholes over the years such as Mayor Garcetti’s blitz, the Oakland citizen’s vigilantes, Mayor Pete’s smart city efforts, a startup spun out of Carnegie Mellon, an R&D project out of a major management consulting firm,… the list goes on. Those shiny pilots haven’t though made a dent in the universe-sized systemic challenge of expensive aging infrastructure and compound O&M costs in America’s city streets.

I recently picked that pothole thread back up as a little hobby, submitting public records act requests to cities across these United States to ascertain how much cities spent surveying street quality and then fixing up their streets. The responses were pretty funny. Some sent back a helpful map. Some ignored the request which is suboptimal from an adherence to the letter of the law. My favorite though was the counter request for $2k for staff time to query various databases.

It’s easy to and many citizens understandably do get angry in the face of perceived intransigence. Absent ample time and ideally a lawyer, a humble citizen doesn’t really have much recourse. Yet having worked inside government, I can imagine that staff in that city has several legacy systems of record and data scattered across various places. Usually it’s not that staff is just exceptionally lazy or lack incentive.

In my experience, people believe in the value of public service and want to do the right thing. Usually it’s just that a combination of time and the accretion of Kafka-esque protocols that tie their hands in knots make even the most zealous idealist ultimately numb. From the staff perspective in that environment, my requests were likely perceived as ill posed in its generality and yet another task to do.

I’ve spent a long time pondering the pothole problem. Part of the underlying challenge is that public works staff swim in water not of their making. There’s a complicated ancient standards that govern how street quality is measured. In the US, the marble cake of government operations means decisions are fragmented across local, state, and federal agencies that allocate funds and actually fix potholes, complicated before you get to the blog of firms, industry associations and other outlets that informally coordinate pothole fixing.

Again making the visible more clear, helps articulate and understand the nature of such an entrenched challenge. Protocol studies has helped break some of my biases accrued over a decade of experience in that domain and also critically offers a toolkit to find leverage points in the pothole funding and fixing stack. Mapping coordinates of street defects, coordinating street cuts with other utilities, filling potholes, resurfacing or restructuring a street, deploying street hardware over trenching, along with with managerial, financial and information flows — all those operations flow through protocols, many of which are long overdue for an upgrade.

I like the example of city streets because it’s very, uh, grounded.

Seeing protocols write large, in all their cyclothone-like mass floating silenting through the twilight interstitial spaces, is like stumbling upon sentient dust mites, nothing scary but certainly surprising, something akin to the sort that pop up frequently in Studio Ghibli films like My Neighbor Totoro or Spirited Away. Below offers a short AI-assisted list of potential lines of inquiry related to cities operations, my particular jam:

• The rules, both explicit and informal, for how local schools interface with afterschool programs, libraries, and parent associations. Not the whole education system, not one classroom, but the woven middle.

• Examine how one open dataset (like LA’s measure of street quality, urban forests or bus schedules) is maintained. Who updates it, what standards exist, and how do private vendors interact with the protocol of release? Where do requirement stem from? (State reporting, Mayor / Council mandates, department management etc.)

• The routing protocol from a complaint (noise, graffiti, pothole) to the right department. Not the entire civic bureaucracy, not a single official, but the handoff chain in the middle.

• Run a controlled experiment where a neighborhood applies for a block party permit under two different rule sets — the existing process vs. a simplified prototype — and measure time, satisfaction, and compliance.

• The rules for how local schools interface with afterschool programs, libraries, and parent associations. Not the whole education system, not one classroom, but the woven middle.

• Conventions like giving up seats, forming queues, or tolerating subway buskers. They’re not laws, but they arbitrate claims of fairness and recognition in crowded, diverse spaces.

• State DOTs and city public works departments share standardized asphalt or concrete mixes (e.g. Caltrans Section 39). These protocols ensure any contractor can bid, while shaping material choices and maintenance cycles industry-wide.

• Small utilities often share accredited water testing labs. Procurement protocols at this level specify sampling frequency, chain-of-custody, and data reporting standards (e.g. Safe Drinking Water Act compliance). It’s not one utility’s RFP, but a shared practice across a region. With a shockingly large number of Californians lacking clean drinking water (>800k) and that enduring challenge globally, such protocols need reinforcing.

The way our government operates is a holdover from the industrial era. There’s bits and pieces of shiny pilots and widgets, but the underlying operating system is obviously increasingly obsolete. Watching those protocols bit by bit provides a path to illuminate new modes of operations that are more adaptive, digitally native and suited to our current situation.

The word obvious etymologically comes from the latin roots “ob” as in toward and “via” as in the way. The latin word obvius had the connotation in the way, easily met. Today as the world lurches from a long complacency and towards upheaval, protocols offer a clear step towards the path through our weird and wild times.

In a time of oracles and aliens, of accelerating AI and bold claims, protocol studies build on a long tradition stretching back to the beginning of civilization, an invisible critical mass like cyclothones that we can see the world anew with fresh eyes. Cheers to the protocols crew on a successful symposia and for those curious to learn more about they strange creatures hiding in plain site, check out the summer of protocols website.

Pioneering protocols for the next City O/S

Earlier this week a gov tech colleague in Colorado shared a sharp provocation: "government is software" That metaphor of government-as-software is certainly punchy. And it packs a kernel of truth. After all, the very word "computer" comes from banks of clerks doing calculations, and many of our bureaucracies are still evolutions of those clerical functions.

https://pioneeringspirit.xyz