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The pothole isn’t the problem.
The process is.
That’s the first thing I learned as an Argonaut—one of a new fellowship embedded inside city government to make the invisible visible: how things actually get done. Not what’s written in the manual or the PDF, but what happens between departments, at the counter, in the inbox. What really delays the repair, stalls the permit, or tangles the procurement.
Our program is called ARGO—Applied Research in Government Operations. We’re a cross-cutting civic utility, designed to provide horizontal capacity across siloed agencies. Where traditional government staff often have to keep their heads down just to meet the day’s demands, Argonauts are given the time and remit to lift their gaze, ask how the pieces fit together, and help prototype new ways they might.
We exist to enable adaptive, digitally native protocols, concrete ways of working that align with today’s tools and realities, not yesterday’s forms and fiefdoms. And unlike the many smart city initiatives that flamed out chasing VC funding and proprietary platforms, ARGO’s tools are provided as public infrastructure, open source, collaborative, and committed to serving the commons.
So no, I’m not here to pitch a new dashboard. I’m here to stand at the corner of LA and Torrance—literally—and figure out why a single trench cut has sat half-repaired for six weeks, and what protocol would allow it to be fixed next time without delay.
This is the work. And this is a day in my life.
7:30 AM — Protocol Sensing
I start my day on Sepulveda Boulevard, where the City of LA meets the City of Torrance. The trench cut in question was made for a utility repair. The temporary patch is already failing—cracked at the edges, sinking near the seam. The repair itself isn’t the issue. The issue is who owns the street.
Turns out, Sepulveda is technically a state highway. That means even though Torrance requested the work and LA’s crew performed it, the final restoration requires a
The pothole isn’t the problem.
The process is.
That’s the first thing I learned as an Argonaut—one of a new fellowship embedded inside city government to make the invisible visible: how things actually get done. Not what’s written in the manual or the PDF, but what happens between departments, at the counter, in the inbox. What really delays the repair, stalls the permit, or tangles the procurement.
Our program is called ARGO—Applied Research in Government Operations. We’re a cross-cutting civic utility, designed to provide horizontal capacity across siloed agencies. Where traditional government staff often have to keep their heads down just to meet the day’s demands, Argonauts are given the time and remit to lift their gaze, ask how the pieces fit together, and help prototype new ways they might.
We exist to enable adaptive, digitally native protocols, concrete ways of working that align with today’s tools and realities, not yesterday’s forms and fiefdoms. And unlike the many smart city initiatives that flamed out chasing VC funding and proprietary platforms, ARGO’s tools are provided as public infrastructure, open source, collaborative, and committed to serving the commons.
So no, I’m not here to pitch a new dashboard. I’m here to stand at the corner of LA and Torrance—literally—and figure out why a single trench cut has sat half-repaired for six weeks, and what protocol would allow it to be fixed next time without delay.
This is the work. And this is a day in my life.
7:30 AM — Protocol Sensing
I start my day on Sepulveda Boulevard, where the City of LA meets the City of Torrance. The trench cut in question was made for a utility repair. The temporary patch is already failing—cracked at the edges, sinking near the seam. The repair itself isn’t the issue. The issue is who owns the street.
Turns out, Sepulveda is technically a state highway. That means even though Torrance requested the work and LA’s crew performed it, the final restoration requires a
I mount our sensing rig to a city fleet Prius and begin scanning nearby streets. The lidar and accelerometers feed real-time condition data into our open protocol engine. The goal isn’t just to spot bad pavement. It’s to tie each defect to its bureaucratic fingerprint—what triggered it, what delayed it, and what can be done to prevent the next one.
10:00 AM — The Atlas of Process
Back at our borrowed conference room near City Yard, I plug the data into the Process Atlas, ARGO’s living schematic of civic operations. Every step of the street restoration process is mapped—permitting, inspections, jurisdiction handoffs, standard specs, vendor assignments.
For this case, we quickly spot the friction: multiple conflicting trench backfill standards, unclear routing protocols for cross-jurisdiction repairs, and an average 12-day lag for interagency permit handoffs. One permit expired in the shuffle; another was misrouted twice.
We start annotating potential fixes—not as hypotheticals, but as executable protocol revisions. The Atlas isn’t a dashboard. It’s a drafting table for better process.
1:00 PM — Fieldwork and Forking
In the afternoon, I meet with permitting leads from LA’s Bureau of Engineering. The room is full of smart, overworked people doing their best with legacy tools. They’re open to help—and they’re ready to try something new.
I pull up protocols from London, Indianapolis, and Singapore—each facing similar infrastructure headaches, each with useful elements we can adapt. London’s layered jurisdiction navigator. Indy’s single-form smart intake. Singapore’s automated notification system for permit milestone delays.
We fork the best components and draft a composite protocol that makes sense for LA: a unified trench permit that flexes based on jurisdiction and project type, complete with triggers for CalTrans coordination and shared inspection routing.
Our backend team is already working alongside City IT to spin up a prototype inside their staging environment. It’s not a whole new platform—it’s a focused sprint, built to integrate with what exists and remove friction where it’s most acute.
4:00 PM — Feeding the Feedback Loop
Everything we’re collecting—sensor data, permit timelines, contractor performance, interagency lag metrics—flows into a new Street Repair Collaborative, a network of cities sharing process-level data to benchmark and improve operations.
This isn't just about open data. It's about open protocols. The Collaborative is beginning to produce analytics that help public works leaders answer crucial operational questions:
Where are we consistently bottlenecking repairs?
Which crews restore streets that stay restored?
How does our performance compare to peer cities over time?
The point isn’t competition—it’s clarity. It’s giving cities the ability to see what’s happening end-to-end and improve without having to reinvent the wheel each time.
6:00 PM — Reflections
I close my laptop as the streetlights blink on across the South Bay. The trench on Sepulveda still needs filling. But today, we made progress—not in asphalt, but in alignment.
This is what I’ve come to understand: the work of fixing cities is not always dramatic. It’s a quiet, steady art of noticing the seams, learning their logic, and rewriting the rules that govern how we respond. It’s not about genius or disruption. It’s about protocol fluency.
And tomorrow, it starts again.
Further reading:
A real world example of a service trench repair delayed for weeks that rhymes with this allegory:
And below is a blog post by my fellow Argonaut Varun Adibhatla from a few years back:
Contextual Note:
This post is written as a civic allegory, a near-future sketch that conveys the deeper truth of what’s possible if we choose to work differently. While not every detail reflects current practice with every "i" dotted and "t" crossed, the story is rooted in real process patterns, institutional constraints, and the kinds of practical fixes already emerging in pockets across the world.
Over the last decade, ARGO has piloted breakthrough initiatives including early street quality sensing, the launch of the California Water Data Collaborative, and the development of civic data projects within public service organizations. What began as side projects and experimental prototypes has steadily coalesced into a durable vision of shared infrastructure for how governments learn, adapt, and act.
The Argonauts are part of a new civic ethos, born from the recognition that our cities don’t need more apps or slogans. They need capacity. They need time and trust to see across silos, make sense of complexity, and iteratively improve. Inspired by insights like those found in Not Well Advised: An Illuminating Analysis of City as Client, this allegory reminds us that real change begins not with top-down blueprints, but with proximity, discernment, and care.
Editing Log:
Here's a post providing context on what I mean by "Written by the Patchwork Protocol."
This piece evolved through several iterations exploring how protocols can make government operations more adaptive and legible. The original draft focused on pavement repair case studies, which were later deepened with the example of Sepulveda Boulevard and the complexities of CalTrans permitting. We shifted the narrative into a first-person perspective to ground the story in lived experience, added a sharper introduction outlining the ARGO fellowship and its public utility model, and replaced abstract tech jargon with concrete examples of protocol forking and intercity collaboration. The contextual note was added last to frame the story as a civic allegory—a near-future sketch rooted in real process truths.
This is part of a recurring series of field notes and mythic seeds from the Patchwork Protocol. These fragments are not final—they are sketches, invitations, and tuning forks for a deeper song waiting to be sung.
Vol 1: The Edge and the Ember
Vol 2: The Quiet Power of California style data collaboratives
Vol 6: Seals, Scrolls, and Softening the Stone That Stops Common Sense Government Operational Updates
Vol 9: The Ekumen Exchange
Vol 11: Breaking the spell that befuddles our efforts to actually build
Vol 12: Strangler Fig Statecraft
I mount our sensing rig to a city fleet Prius and begin scanning nearby streets. The lidar and accelerometers feed real-time condition data into our open protocol engine. The goal isn’t just to spot bad pavement. It’s to tie each defect to its bureaucratic fingerprint—what triggered it, what delayed it, and what can be done to prevent the next one.
10:00 AM — The Atlas of Process
Back at our borrowed conference room near City Yard, I plug the data into the Process Atlas, ARGO’s living schematic of civic operations. Every step of the street restoration process is mapped—permitting, inspections, jurisdiction handoffs, standard specs, vendor assignments.
For this case, we quickly spot the friction: multiple conflicting trench backfill standards, unclear routing protocols for cross-jurisdiction repairs, and an average 12-day lag for interagency permit handoffs. One permit expired in the shuffle; another was misrouted twice.
We start annotating potential fixes—not as hypotheticals, but as executable protocol revisions. The Atlas isn’t a dashboard. It’s a drafting table for better process.
1:00 PM — Fieldwork and Forking
In the afternoon, I meet with permitting leads from LA’s Bureau of Engineering. The room is full of smart, overworked people doing their best with legacy tools. They’re open to help—and they’re ready to try something new.
I pull up protocols from London, Indianapolis, and Singapore—each facing similar infrastructure headaches, each with useful elements we can adapt. London’s layered jurisdiction navigator. Indy’s single-form smart intake. Singapore’s automated notification system for permit milestone delays.
We fork the best components and draft a composite protocol that makes sense for LA: a unified trench permit that flexes based on jurisdiction and project type, complete with triggers for CalTrans coordination and shared inspection routing.
Our backend team is already working alongside City IT to spin up a prototype inside their staging environment. It’s not a whole new platform—it’s a focused sprint, built to integrate with what exists and remove friction where it’s most acute.
4:00 PM — Feeding the Feedback Loop
Everything we’re collecting—sensor data, permit timelines, contractor performance, interagency lag metrics—flows into a new Street Repair Collaborative, a network of cities sharing process-level data to benchmark and improve operations.
This isn't just about open data. It's about open protocols. The Collaborative is beginning to produce analytics that help public works leaders answer crucial operational questions:
Where are we consistently bottlenecking repairs?
Which crews restore streets that stay restored?
How does our performance compare to peer cities over time?
The point isn’t competition—it’s clarity. It’s giving cities the ability to see what’s happening end-to-end and improve without having to reinvent the wheel each time.
6:00 PM — Reflections
I close my laptop as the streetlights blink on across the South Bay. The trench on Sepulveda still needs filling. But today, we made progress—not in asphalt, but in alignment.
This is what I’ve come to understand: the work of fixing cities is not always dramatic. It’s a quiet, steady art of noticing the seams, learning their logic, and rewriting the rules that govern how we respond. It’s not about genius or disruption. It’s about protocol fluency.
And tomorrow, it starts again.
Further reading:
A real world example of a service trench repair delayed for weeks that rhymes with this allegory:
And below is a blog post by my fellow Argonaut Varun Adibhatla from a few years back:
Contextual Note:
This post is written as a civic allegory, a near-future sketch that conveys the deeper truth of what’s possible if we choose to work differently. While not every detail reflects current practice with every "i" dotted and "t" crossed, the story is rooted in real process patterns, institutional constraints, and the kinds of practical fixes already emerging in pockets across the world.
Over the last decade, ARGO has piloted breakthrough initiatives including early street quality sensing, the launch of the California Water Data Collaborative, and the development of civic data projects within public service organizations. What began as side projects and experimental prototypes has steadily coalesced into a durable vision of shared infrastructure for how governments learn, adapt, and act.
The Argonauts are part of a new civic ethos, born from the recognition that our cities don’t need more apps or slogans. They need capacity. They need time and trust to see across silos, make sense of complexity, and iteratively improve. Inspired by insights like those found in Not Well Advised: An Illuminating Analysis of City as Client, this allegory reminds us that real change begins not with top-down blueprints, but with proximity, discernment, and care.
Editing Log:
Here's a post providing context on what I mean by "Written by the Patchwork Protocol."
This piece evolved through several iterations exploring how protocols can make government operations more adaptive and legible. The original draft focused on pavement repair case studies, which were later deepened with the example of Sepulveda Boulevard and the complexities of CalTrans permitting. We shifted the narrative into a first-person perspective to ground the story in lived experience, added a sharper introduction outlining the ARGO fellowship and its public utility model, and replaced abstract tech jargon with concrete examples of protocol forking and intercity collaboration. The contextual note was added last to frame the story as a civic allegory—a near-future sketch rooted in real process truths.
This is part of a recurring series of field notes and mythic seeds from the Patchwork Protocol. These fragments are not final—they are sketches, invitations, and tuning forks for a deeper song waiting to be sung.
Vol 1: The Edge and the Ember
Vol 2: The Quiet Power of California style data collaboratives
Vol 6: Seals, Scrolls, and Softening the Stone That Stops Common Sense Government Operational Updates
Vol 9: The Ekumen Exchange
Vol 11: Breaking the spell that befuddles our efforts to actually build
Vol 12: Strangler Fig Statecraft
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