Over 200 subscribers
"If you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere..." so the old song goes. In our case, “there” was a mount on a municipal vehicle in New York City. And “it” was SQUID—a dirt-simple, open-source street quality sensor, built to ride the rough edges of reality.
We weren’t seeking to build a startup per say. We were trying to improve how cities fix potholes.
It began as a whisper of possibility: what if we could see the streets the way a city truck does—every bump, crack, and rut mapped and memorialized not by anecdote, but by sensor?
So we built SQUID (Street Quality Identification Device). It was open hardware, designed on a shoestring and bolted onto city fleet vehicles. It worked. New York City tested it, and suddenly potholes weren’t just a political punchline—they were data. SQUID graced the front page of the subway papers. The proof of concept didn’t just survive the Big Apple—it thrived.
Then, the magic of open source took over.
Rome. Santiago. Code refactored. SQUID evolved—tracking bike lanes, not just car roads. Sensors as citizen diplomats, whispering truths to power.
The streets tell a story, but the problem was always the same: the data gaps. No matter how many models you integrate, how many satellites you task, or spreadsheets you update—if you don’t have a physical signal from the real world, the map loses touch with the territory.
We don’t need another moonshot. We need a broomshot—humble tools that touch ground and sweep insight from overlooked places.
What we need is a public sector-adjacent rapid prototyping lab—a space to build SQUIDs for everything. To test, deploy, and iterate sensor hardware and software that fill in the blind spots of our civic decision-making. Because when you know which street is about to crumble, or which sidewalk floods first, you can fix it before it breaks. That’s radically common sense.
Now imagine if there were an entity purpose-built for this work.
The emerging model of the Focused Research Organization (FRO)—championed by folks like the Renaissance Philanthropy team and explored in initiatives like the BRAINs Fellowships—offers a new blueprint. A FRO is not academia. It’s not a startup. It’s a third thing: an agile, time-bound, mission-focused R&D group that builds what no one else can or will.
What DARPA is to defense, a public infrastructure FRO could be to potholes, lead pipes, decarbonization retrofits, and climate sensors.
For a fraction of the cost of a traditional contract, and with ten times the clarity, a FRO can build the proof of concept, open source it, and let the ecosystem scale it.
What’s missing is a trusted applied partner—one that can navigate the messy intersections of city bureaucracy, open source communities, and sensor deployments on dusty curbs and frozen scaffolds.
SQUID was never just a sensor. It was a signal—of what becomes possible when practitioners, dreamers, and public servants collaborate not for private gain, but public wisdom.
In Kim Stanley Robinson’s vision of the Mondragon Accord, the world unites around protocols of survival and stewardship. SQUID is a local parable of that meta-protocol: collaborative, commons-oriented, radically practical. It wasn’t planned in a think tank or launched from a VC pitch deck. It was made by hands in service of streets.
And it showed the world something essential: that if we build the right tools together—not perfect, but useful—we can navigate the planetary crisis with intelligence and integrity.
We don't need to wait for Silicon Valley to stumble into civics. We can build the lab ourselves. Sensor by sensor. Protocol by protocol. Street by street.
The time to prototype the future is now.
@patwater
