(ËŒpaɪəˈnɪərɪŋ ˈspɪrɪt ) noun. a willingness to endure hardship in order to explore new places or try out new things 

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The next frontier of government operations

It has been basic United States policy that Government should foster the opening of new frontiers. It opened the seas to clipper ships and furnished land for pioneers. Although these frontiers have more or less disappeared, the frontier of science remains. - Vanevar BushA decade ago, I wrote a long piece looking at the history of information technology innovation and related shifts in government operations. IBM's origins date back to the challenges with a late 19th century census and need for...

#california#government#operations#future#frontier#change#different#city#urban
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How ending traffic in LA will save the world (or the opportunity for a breakthrough in global climate action)

In the wake of the recent devestating wildfires, Governor Newsom has floated the idea of a "Marshall Plan" to build "LA 2.0," to mixed reactions. In the spirit of building the new I thought it timely to reshare this essay that I wrote and published during California's first global climate action summit in 2018. This week California Governor Brown will host the historic global climate action summit with other global luminaries this week in San Francisco. The goal is to show the overwhelming gr...

#burn#the#wagons#pioneer#avs#autonomous#vehicles
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2030: The Battle for a New California Dream

Sometimes I wonder if I time-traveled back two decades if I could explain how we got to today's world to my high school self or anyone around then. Would anyone believe the US had been at war for twenty years or that a cameo real estate guy from Home Alone became president? In many ways day to day life - the cars, the built environment - hasn't really changed, but so much of the news is psychodrama. Today I generally bet on things getting weirder. What does the future hold? Today while scroll...

#california#dream#future#today#governance#government#operations#digital#transformation
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Of upstart entrepots and dying empires

Kicking off the New Year, I started reading City of Fortune, a wonderful history of Venice recommended by Venkatesh Rao and part of his 2025 Contraptions book club. It's great history, full of the hubris of a dying empire and the rise of scrappy literal swamp dwellers who forge a trading empire with grit and gumption. The latter of course is the now esteemed City of Venice. The book provides a fascinating history of the political economy and history that led to the rise of a powerful city sta...

#city#future#governance#reflections#meditations#venice#byzantines
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Building 10x more state capacity to address megafires and climate-proof California

With increasingly intense megafires, Michael Wara, a Stanford based fire and climate expert, has presciently called for a new state agency focused on proactive action to mitigate catastrophic fires before they happen since 2020. That's an excellent idea and I'd note we don't need a new competing center complete with competing turf battles and increased coordination headwinds. Nor do we need a specialized hyper-focused plan producing shop that results in reports that sit on shelves. What we do...

#megafire#california#state#capacity#analytics#digital
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The little cognitive loads that contribute to a crisis

One thing I've been thinking a lot about the last 42 hours is the street sweeping signs. That's sort of silly since I've been helping family members evacuate and there's a generational climate crisis happening. A decade ago, I remember there was a thought that those would be digitized and protocolized as part of Coord Curb's API, a Google backed next generation approach to "smart" cities. That didn't really take off though it's a big little thing. It's yet another thing to worry about moving ...

#smart#city#sustainble#street#sweeping
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The invisible cost of the state capacity crisis is increasingly invisible no longer

UPDATE: In the Pacific Palisades, fire hydrants ran dry around 3 AM last night. "The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP) confirmed they have received water shortage reports but could not confirm how many hydrants are effected." One of the saddest parts of working on public technology projects is seeing 1) incredible world class talent want to tackle important public problems like the climate crisis and 2) the struggle at best for the public sector to deploy that talent. In the ear...

#climate#crisis#state#capacity#reform#fire#la
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The lost art of planning

Happy New Year everyone! Time for type A people to make a long list of overambitious goals and resolutions that’ll be abandoned in a month or two. 😛 That whole exercise reminds me of the sad state of public planning, particularly in the US. Take a city, any city or municipal government therein, and you’ll find oodles of plans on their website. Long, shiny and lots of consultant hours went into those static pdfs. Yet ask a random manager from one of those organizations what they’re specifical...

#planning#frontier#government#new_years#data#forecasting#analytics#digital#transformation#cat
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Pioneering Spirit | First Year Roundup and Super Short Reader Survey

Dear Reader, It's been a year! I really enjoyed writing more and hoped you enjoy reading. This blog is still early and very much a work in progress so I hope you please do share your feedback for improvement in the comments below or the link here -- whatever is easier. 2024 stayed on brand for the past decade and stayed weird. Looking at the folly of our current times, an era that echoes elite failures like the sleepwalking into world war one, I wrote a review of Barbara Tuchman's magisterial...

#annual#roundup#first_year#survey#blog
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The need to employ and empower expertise inside government to actually deliver results

Below are a pair of excellent excerpts from recently released reports. Both are well worth reading in full. "The folly of skimping on internal core competence is well established in many domains. One paper by Zachary Liscow of Yale finds a remarkable correlation between the staffing levels of state departments of transportation and the per-mile construction cost of highways: increasing employment by one person per thousand in a population reduces costs by 26 percent.28 When there is insuffici...

#cat#state#capacity#digital#government