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There’s a strange nostalgia I carry for a particular weekend in the early 2010s—a time when a hackathon still carried a kind of enchanted promise, like the Fool stepping off the cliff in search of a kingdom he couldn’t yet name.
That weekend, I found myself on a team with a talented IDEO designer, deep in the churn of laptops, Red Bulls, and whiteboards scribbled with arrows and circles that might have been glyphs from a cargo cult. The prompt was public sector innovation, and what emerged from our improbable union was a prototype we called Gov Sherpa: a protocol—not a product—for pairing tech companies with seasoned guides to navigate sui generis government challenges. The idea was simple: many founders wandered into Sacramento with messianic fervor and stumbled back dazed by acronyms and procurement calendars. Gov Sherpa would match their boldness with wisdom, ambition with attunement. A kind of adaptive scaffolding to bridge the Valley and the Hill.
It was born, paradoxically, not from abstraction but from deep, worm's-eye collisions. At one point, our team stood on a busy street corner doing design intercepts. The IDEO designer leaned into a conversation and asked a passerby, “How do you interact with government?” I visibly winced. The question felt... global. Like asking a fish how it interacts with water. But the cringing revealed something, too: the hidden assumptions in the very questions we ask. It matters what we mean by “developer.” In Sacramento, a developer might pave cul-de-sacs in Palmdale. In the Valley, they might code smart contracts for planetary coordination. Both wield power. Both alter the landscape.
Gov Sherpa was never implemented, not really. It stayed a sketch in the margins, like many good ideas from that early, more optimistic era when "what if" was a rallying cry for innovation in cities. But the impulse remains—the need to guide bold energy through sacred complexity without crushing it. And I see that same impulse alive in these newer efforts: the Refugia Protocol, which doesn’t command but invites. The Mondragon Accord, a meta-protocol of protocols, forged in planetary realism. Each one tries to do the same thing Gov Sherpa aspired to: to gently midwife the emergence of the next thing, the right thing—not the efficient thing, but the enduring thing.
The Second Foundation isn’t a place. It’s a practice. A way of attuning boldness to complexity. Gov Sherpa never shipped. But perhaps it was never meant to. Gov Sherpa was a seed, and like many seeds, it disappeared into the soil. But maybe, just maybe, its roots have been growing underground ever since.
And now it’s spring.
This is part of a recurring series of field notes and mythic seeds from the Patchwork Protocol, a network of friends, collaborators, and planetary stewards working to prototype the Second Foundation. These fragments are not final—they are sketches, invitations, and tuning forks for a deeper song waiting to be sung.
@patwater
