Pioneering Spirit

The myth of the infinite inbox

People tell me work once happened before email. What strange practices did that involve? How did that function day to day? Guided by the light of oral history and forged by the fire of work stress tinged with so many emails, I asked my AI assistant to spin a mythopoetic yarn about the creation of the inbox, its power over its former masters, and ultimately point to how we might live in harmony with the inbox. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Enjoy! In the First Days, before the Stream...

Pioneering Spirit

Pioneering a post-carbon path that actually works for people

Pioneering Spirit

If we want to make real progress on climate action, we have to be honest with ourselves: asking people to sacrifice in the name of a better future only gets us so far. Sure, there are moments of altruistic inspiration. But enduring systems change? That happens when we make the sustainable path the easy, obvious, and self-interested one—when it works better, faster, cheaper. In other words, we need to design climate action that doesn’t just appeal to our better angels, but to our everyday ince...

Enabling city data to flow like water

Pioneering Spirit

As the climate crisis escalates, the old ways of managing city infrastructure—siloed departments, static plans, and reactive maintenance—simply won’t cut it. The wildfires, floods, and heatwaves hitting Southern California are not isolated incidents; they’re symptoms of deeper systemic fragility. If we’re going to build true resilience, we need to look at our cities as whole systems—where housing, mobility, land use, water, and energy are deeply interconnected. The future of infrastructure is...

S.Q.U.I.D. and the City: An Odyssey in Civic Sensing

Pioneering Spirit

My good friend and former co-founder shared the following story on LinkedIn about our work building a low cost street quality sensor. That type of work is radically common sense. Cities don't actually know where all the potholes are and overpay a consultant-industrial complex for suboptimal garbage-in-garbage-out reports that don't actually reflect the operational reality of urban infrastructure. As we grapple with the climate crisis and the massive disruption recked by DOGE, there's an urgen...

An open letter to Jerry Brown on the sustainability of the human species

Pioneering Spirit

To Governor Jerry Brown, This is our most desperate hour. I regret that I am unable to present this message in person, but I am writing from the edge of a strange precipice in time. The future of our species is teetering on the brink. We are losing the plot. The American experiment in self-governance needs deep renewal. The threats to the future of the republic have returned. The winds grow hotter, with hurricane force firestorms devastating communities close to my home in Southern California...

Autonomous vehicles and the future of California water management

Pioneering Spirit

I originally published this piece in 2017. I thought I'd share it with my lovely newsletter community. What do autonomous vehicles have to do with California water? More than you might think. Governor Brown recently declared the end of the California drought and has released a new long term framework to make conservation a way of life in California. As we think long term about California’s urban water use, it’s worth noting that autonomous vehicles will have transformative impacts on urban wa...

Fifteen theses about the near future of government operations

Pioneering Spirit

"Where is the California alternative to DOGE?" - Bill Maher in conversation with Ezra Klein and Andrew Sullivan. That's an important question. Governor Newsom responded earlier saying effectively that there's already the State Office of Digital Innovation. But here's the former CA state chief data officer saying that the model for the last decade hasn't worked and the gov tech movement needs to step its game up. More deeply, the flames of today’s tribalistic politics are fueled by a deep dist...

Agile (Physical!) Infrastructure Development

Pioneering Spirit

You've heard about agile software development, right? The web 2.0 manifesto usurped the upper echelons of high technology and overthrew the waterfall crowned kings of the 1990's internet. I'd like to share an example of what we can call agile infrastructure development. Here I don't mean servers or data warehouses or any backend bits or bytes. I mean moving actual atoms. Specifically essential infrastructure and more specifically a stormwater recharge facility in my hometown, a humble ditch w...

An open letter to Lin-Manuel Miranda on the last, best hope to save the republic

Pioneering Spirit

Sir, The hour grows late. The President asserts the right to govern by decree. Worse, the Congress has ceded its constitutional prerogatives, neglecting to protect its power of the purse and even the sanctity of its chambers from executive overreach. Charles I chuckles from the grave. In this dark and doom filled hour, one hope remains: the power of story, aided and abetted by unassailable songs stirring up this country’s frayed and nearly forgotten faith in this experiment in self-governance...

Remembering America's First Cloud President

Pioneering Spirit

"If Truman was the Nuclear President, Kennedy the Space President, and Eisenhower the Interstate President, Obama will be the Cloud President." -VGR Venkatesh Rao wrote a nice little piece in 2008 providing an overview of the presidential technological eras and arguing that Obama would be the first cloud president. The piece aged very well so I thought I'd share some of the key excerpts. “Obama has a few technological levers he can push, as he looks for ways to deal with his big problems: two...

Do you pick up your dog's poop?

Pioneering Spirit

It’s a fairly loaded question layered with lots of baggage, both literally with the protocol of bagging up dog defecation and metaphorically with moral sentiments. A few years back, my local hometown weekly newspaper ran a “Spiritually Speaking” piece with a neighbor wondering how in a good community like ours, there could be people who didn’t pick up their dogs poop. It was a revealing wonder, in a way a microcosm of the problem of evil in the human heart. Especially considering the normally...

The next frontier of government operations

Pioneering Spirit

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...

How ending traffic in LA will save the world (or the opportunity for a breakthrough in global climate action)

Pioneering Spirit

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...

Pioneering a post-carbon path that actually works for people

Pioneering Spirit

Enabling city data to flow like water

Pioneering Spirit

S.Q.U.I.D. and the City: An Odyssey in Civic Sensing

Pioneering Spirit

An open letter to Jerry Brown on the sustainability of the human species

Pioneering Spirit

Autonomous vehicles and the future of California water management

Pioneering Spirit

Fifteen theses about the near future of government operations

Pioneering Spirit

Agile (Physical!) Infrastructure Development

Pioneering Spirit

An open letter to Lin-Manuel Miranda on the last, best hope to save the republic

Pioneering Spirit

Remembering America's First Cloud President

Pioneering Spirit

Do you pick up your dog's poop?

Pioneering Spirit

The next frontier of government operations

Pioneering Spirit

How ending traffic in LA will save the world (or the opportunity for a breakthrough in global climate action)

Pioneering Spirit

Written by

@patwater

a willingness to endure hardship in order to explore new places or try out new things

Subscribers200+

Posts75

Collects15