On a lonely rock at the edge of the galaxy, a quiet experiment in survival took root. In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, while the crumbling Galactic Empire waged wars and chased power, a hidden order—the Second Foundation—was seeded at “Star’s End.” Not with force or command, but through understanding. Not by replacing old institutions, but by subtly reshaping them from within. Its tools were minds, not weapons; protocols, not platforms. Its mission: guide civilization through collapse toward a more stable and human future.

The Second Foundation endured not because it controlled power, but because it cultivated coherence—a distributed intelligence, embedded in the interstices of bureaucracy and memory. Theirs was a quiet revolution of rhythm, trust, and shared understanding.

Here in California, we’ve begun something similar.

The California Protocol for Data Collaboratives emerged not from grand declarations but from humble necessity. In the face of drought, municipal water managers needed clarity, quickly. No single agency could solve the problem alone. But through trust, shared value, and a coalition of the willing, they discovered something far more powerful than any dashboard: a way of working together.

Here’s the protocol—distilled not into code, but cadence:

1. Trust & Value
   The protocol begins not with tech, but with relationships. Before collaboration, there must be trust. And before trust, there must be value—real, tangible benefits that participants can see and feel. Shared insight. Collective leverage. Better service for their communities.

2. Champions & Coalition of the Willing
   A single champion is never enough. The work begins when a constellation of municipal managers and analysts rallies around a shared challenge. This is not a hierarchy, but a network—a voluntary alliance of those ready to move. These actors are the civic equivalent of the Rebel Alliance: different missions, one purpose. They build the gravitational field for shared work to orbit around.

3. Institutional Knowledge Meets Analytical Talent
   The protocol thrives on the fusion of field wisdom and data fluency. Local managers bring deep contextual knowledge. Analysts bring technical tools. Through a regular feedback loop, they generate insight that is both actionable and grounded. Data doesn’t float abstractly; it is woven into the fibers of real decisions.

4. Shared Talent, Shared Scale
   Most agencies can’t afford full-time data science teams. But together, they can. By pooling data science capacity around common problems—whether drought tracking, customer equity, or capital planning—jurisdictions unlock economies of scale. One analyst’s work can uplift dozens of communities. As the UN case study on CaDC puts it, the collaborative structure offers agencies “a research team bigger than what they could have afforded in-house, to solve their problem at a nominal fee.”

5. Cadence & Time
   Monthly rhythms—not fire drills—keep the collaborative alive. This steady, deliberate pace is faster than most bureaucracies but avoids the frenetic churn of startups or political cycles. It balances agility with durability, creating space for trust, iteration, and adaptation. Time, in this protocol, is not a barrier—it’s a nutrient.

This isn’t a startup playbook. It’s a civic ritual. And it works.

Through this protocol, the California Data Collaborative has helped standardize meter-level water data, aligned capital improvement plans, mapped customer equity, and even informed state-level policies. Its success has earned recognition on the global stage, with a detailed UN case study examining its governance, technical infrastructure, and financial sustainability as a rare model of effective data sharing.

Much like the Second Foundation, the CaDC doesn’t seek to command. It seeks to tune—to offer coherence in the noise, rhythm in the rush.

If the 20th century was about industrial organization—about building factories, hierarchies, and command structures—the 21st must be about building protocols. Not rigid systems, but supple ones. Not central plans, but shared agreements. Because complexity is no longer the exception—it’s the condition.

And there is no better place to pioneer these new civic protocols than California.

California doesn’t just have big problems—it has beautiful problems. Wicked, cross-cutting, urgent problems. Drought and flood. Housing and homelessness. Wildfire and resilience. These are not technical glitches. They are tests of governance, imagination, and coordination. And in their scale and stakes, they offer something precious: the chance to build tools that matter.

As the old saying goes, there is nothing wrong with California that what is right with California cannot fix. We have the talent, the diversity, the spirit of experimentation. But more importantly, we have the need—and the humility to know that no one city, no one agency, no one platform will save us.

But protocols provide a path to wayfind through our weird and wild times.

We have the opportunity to turn a breakdown into a breakthrough. To transform crisis into coherence. To seed a Second Foundation—not at Star’s End, but here, among the aqueducts and zoning codes and open data portals of the Golden State.

Further reading:

• UN Case Study: California Data Collaborative (PDF)

• Data Collaboratives: How California Can Become the Open Data Capital of the World

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.

• Vol 1: The Edge and the Ember

• Vol 2: The Quiet Power of California style data collaboratives

• Vol 3: Gov Sherpa and The Worms Eye View

• Vol 4: Street Sensors and the New Civic Commons

• Vol 5: What if cities were designed for the digital age?

• Vol 6: Seals, Scrolls, and Softening the Stone That Stops Common Sense Government Operational Updates

• Vol 7: Upending the consultant industrial complex

• Vol 8:

On a lonely rock at the edge of the galaxy, a quiet experiment in survival took root. In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, while the crumbling Galactic Empire waged wars and chased power, a hidden order—the Second Foundation—was seeded at “Star’s End.” Not with force or command, but through understanding. Not by replacing old institutions, but by subtly reshaping them from within. Its tools were minds, not weapons; protocols, not platforms. Its mission: guide civilization through collapse toward a more stable and human future.

The Second Foundation endured not because it controlled power, but because it cultivated coherence—a distributed intelligence, embedded in the interstices of bureaucracy and memory. Theirs was a quiet revolution of rhythm, trust, and shared understanding.

Here in California, we’ve begun something similar.

The California Protocol for Data Collaboratives emerged not from grand declarations but from humble necessity. In the face of drought, municipal water managers needed clarity, quickly. No single agency could solve the problem alone. But through trust, shared value, and a coalition of the willing, they discovered something far more powerful than any dashboard: a way of working together.

Here’s the protocol—distilled not into code, but cadence:

1. Trust & Value
   The protocol begins not with tech, but with relationships. Before collaboration, there must be trust. And before trust, there must be value—real, tangible benefits that participants can see and feel. Shared insight. Collective leverage. Better service for their communities.

2. Champions & Coalition of the Willing
   A single champion is never enough. The work begins when a constellation of municipal managers and analysts rallies around a shared challenge. This is not a hierarchy, but a network—a voluntary alliance of those ready to move. These actors are the civic equivalent of the Rebel Alliance: different missions, one purpose. They build the gravitational field for shared work to orbit around.

3. Institutional Knowledge Meets Analytical Talent
   The protocol thrives on the fusion of field wisdom and data fluency. Local managers bring deep contextual knowledge. Analysts bring technical tools. Through a regular feedback loop, they generate insight that is both actionable and grounded. Data doesn’t float abstractly; it is woven into the fibers of real decisions.

4. Shared Talent, Shared Scale
   Most agencies can’t afford full-time data science teams. But together, they can. By pooling data science capacity around common problems—whether drought tracking, customer equity, or capital planning—jurisdictions unlock economies of scale. One analyst’s work can uplift dozens of communities. As the UN case study on CaDC puts it, the collaborative structure offers agencies “a research team bigger than what they could have afforded in-house, to solve their problem at a nominal fee.”

5. Cadence & Time
   Monthly rhythms—not fire drills—keep the collaborative alive. This steady, deliberate pace is faster than most bureaucracies but avoids the frenetic churn of startups or political cycles. It balances agility with durability, creating space for trust, iteration, and adaptation. Time, in this protocol, is not a barrier—it’s a nutrient.

This isn’t a startup playbook. It’s a civic ritual. And it works.

Through this protocol, the California Data Collaborative has helped standardize meter-level water data, aligned capital improvement plans, mapped customer equity, and even informed state-level policies. Its success has earned recognition on the global stage, with a detailed UN case study examining its governance, technical infrastructure, and financial sustainability as a rare model of effective data sharing.

Much like the Second Foundation, the CaDC doesn’t seek to command. It seeks to tune—to offer coherence in the noise, rhythm in the rush.

If the 20th century was about industrial organization—about building factories, hierarchies, and command structures—the 21st must be about building protocols. Not rigid systems, but supple ones. Not central plans, but shared agreements. Because complexity is no longer the exception—it’s the condition.

And there is no better place to pioneer these new civic protocols than California.

California doesn’t just have big problems—it has beautiful problems. Wicked, cross-cutting, urgent problems. Drought and flood. Housing and homelessness. Wildfire and resilience. These are not technical glitches. They are tests of governance, imagination, and coordination. And in their scale and stakes, they offer something precious: the chance to build tools that matter.

As the old saying goes, there is nothing wrong with California that what is right with California cannot fix. We have the talent, the diversity, the spirit of experimentation. But more importantly, we have the need—and the humility to know that no one city, no one agency, no one platform will save us.

But protocols provide a path to wayfind through our weird and wild times.

We have the opportunity to turn a breakdown into a breakthrough. To transform crisis into coherence. To seed a Second Foundation—not at Star’s End, but here, among the aqueducts and zoning codes and open data portals of the Golden State.

Further reading:

• UN Case Study: California Data Collaborative (PDF)

• Data Collaboratives: How California Can Become the Open Data Capital of the World

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.

• Vol 1: The Edge and the Ember

• Vol 2: The Quiet Power of California style data collaboratives

• Vol 3: Gov Sherpa and The Worms Eye View

• Vol 4: Street Sensors and the New Civic Commons

• Vol 5: What if cities were designed for the digital age?

• Vol 6: Seals, Scrolls, and Softening the Stone That Stops Common Sense Government Operational Updates

• Vol 7: Upending the consultant industrial complex

• Vol 8: