Dirt Simple
Issue #17: Shovels & AI memos, hardened commons, and Discord highlights
In this issue: A case study at the Southern California Metropolitan Water District that examines the problems – and opportunities – of the public sector’s invisible mazes of protocols. Also: community highlights, some recommended reads, SoP25 spotlight, and upcoming guest talks.
Highlights from Discord
Planning for Protocol Worlds at Edge Esmeralda is underway. There’s a new #edge-esmeralda channel on the Discord server and the #reading-room is turning into a bona fide library. Here’s what happened this week:
Discussion about this week’s guest talk, Alignment Protocols, with Emmett Shear.
Art kits, diamond painting and protocolized art in #idle-protocol-musings.
Some deep cuts in #protocol-watch: Chernobyl rehabilitation and radiation testing, a survey of emerging AI protocols like MCP, MLOS, and ACP, and procurement workflows.
Axelrod and Bennett’s 1993 paper A Landscape Theory of Aggregation found its way into #reading-room after this week’s talk on alignment protocols.
And, of course, many people said hello in #introductions – it might seem like a daunting thing to contribute to protocol studies, but it’s a good time to dive in. We think you can get 80% up to speed in just a weekend by finishing the Protocol Reader. Let us know if you take on the challenge!
Edge Esmeralda 2025 promises to be an excellent event, and Summer of Protocols is sponsoring 20 attendees – including the SoP25 teaching fellow. If you’ll be there in Week 1 between May 25-31 (and you should) join us for sessions on protocol thinking, salon-style talks, and demo courses.
Next Week’s Guest Talk
Join us next Wednesday, May 7th at 10am PDT, for a Substack Live about some emerging terms of art in Protocol studies: hardened commons, tensions, and engineered arguments. How can protocols make commons – like open-source software repositories, libraries, public intelligences, and water reservoirs – more resistant to capture and degradation?
Tune in with
who will share an updated version of a recent seminar hosted with the Southern California Metropolitan Water District (which this Issue’s main case study is about).SoP25 Spotlight
Primavera De Filippi is an artist and legal scholar at Harvard University, exploring the intersection between art, law and technology, focusing specifically on the legal and political implications of blockchain technology and AI. Her artistic practice instantiates the key findings of her research in the physical world, creating blockchain-based lifeforms that evolve and reproduce themselves as people feed them with cryptocurrencies. More info at https://pdefilippi.com
Tentative course title: Protocol Art
Dirt Simple
Innovation in government doesn’t fail for lack of good ideas. It fails because too many people are stuck trying to decode an invisible maze of protocols, half-remembered workarounds, and institutional memory trapped in someone’s Outlook archive.
That’s why we at the California Adaptive Technology (CAT) Initiative are telling the story of a quiet but powerful shift at Crescenta Valley Water District (CVWD). This article contains two case studies of how front-line workers can use protocols – often perceived as top-down, bureaucratic excess – to help a government to do what it’s supposed to do: deliver.
This isn’t about a moonshot. It’s about a ditch, a spreadsheet and an AI-generated memorandum. Let’s dive in.
Decade Ditch
Nearly ten years. That’s how long it took to build a stormwater recharge ditch in my hometown north of L.A. Not a dam. Not a desalination plant. Just a basic diversion channel – a design older than modern civilization itself. The kind of thing you could (and we did!) dig in a single day.
Why do we need stormwater ditches? They recharge groundwater, save money, and help maintain the environment. Everyone agreed to dig – except the permitting gods, who require you to consult an oracle, get a permit, maybe loop in the Army Corps, and definitely chase down a property rights signoff – that may or may not exist. Kafka would be proud.
So what did we do? We flowed like water.
First of all, we went straight to the site with a shovel in hand. Talked to people on the ground. When the permitting maze got too thick, we looked for workarounds (what we like to call scenic routes). Instead of taking the most direct path of permit acquisition, we partnered with a local NGO that owned the Rosemont Preserve parcel) and used their existing permit as a legal hack. That mutually beneficial workaround was hardened in a memorandum of understanding – drafted by AI. Bureaucratic aikido.
The Obstacle is The Way
As above, so below – we now had to find an underground workaround. CVWD’s service area isn’t called Rockcrescenta for nothing. Big boulders are just part of the deal.
But here’s where taking matters into your own hands makes a difference: when you do projects in-house, you are more adaptable. You can handle surprises – like a refrigerator-sized rock – without triggering a $200,000 contractor change order. Let’s be real: if you give some folks an excuse to nickel-and-dime you, they will.
This was a major learning from the project: keep projects in-house where you can flex. Being able to manage uncertainty and learn on the way is an organizational competency. And on average, it’s cheaper, faster, and more resilient.
Look Back to Move Forward
A quick aside before another case study Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) project and future frontiers, let’s talk about one of the most underutilized tools in the public sector: project retrospectives.
After a scramble over a grant deadline nearly derailed a big AMI (An AMI streams real time water usage data) project, CVWD didn’t just breathe a sigh of relief and move on. The team paused. They asked: What happened? What assumptions broke? Where did we trip?
That reflective pattern of behavior is a protocol.We do short, scheduled after-action reviews for every major milestone. No finger-pointing. Just learning. And that learning loop becomes a central feature ofan adaptive organization.
AMI: From Turf War to Operational Triumph
CVWD’s AMI project is a case study in how bureaucratic stalemates can sabotage good policy – and how dirt-simple protocols can fix it.
Here’s what happened:
The District spent millions of dollars installing AMI meters.
The meters were physically in the ground.
But the radios that made them “smart”? Not installed.
Why? A tangle of turf battles, budget shortfalls, and a byzantine process involving a dozen spreadsheets, mismatched schedules, and unclear ownership.
For over a decade, less than 0.2% of customers could actually access their water data. That’s not underperformance. That’s institutional irony.Then came the protocol shift:
One unified list.
It synced automatically between field and office teams.
It exposed bottlenecks.
It replaced email scavenger hunts with shared visibility.
It turned data chaos into coordinated delivery.
Not a dashboard. Not a portal. Just an all hands email to CVWD’s 32 staff people. One place, one update, one operational picture. Suddenly, everyone – from finance to field crews – had visibility. Gaps surfaced andaction followed naturally.
Simple. Shared. Sane.
The result of that work? Today 93%+ of customers can access their water data. The project is on track for completion this fiscal year. Same people. Same meters. Just better protocols.
The Discovery Protocol: Meta-Infrastructure for Trust
Bureaucratic systems love to optimize processes. But what they often forget is that trust is a kind of infrastructure in its own right.
One of the lesser-known but most transformative protocols CVWD implemented wasn’t digital or operational – it was relational. Internally known as the Discovery Protocol, it wasn’t built in Airtable or coded into a permit script. It was built into long lunches, meandering walks, and unhurried conversation.
Here’s how it worked:
Staff were encouraged – formally – to take extended 90-minute lunch breaks. Not to “catch up on work” or “power through,” but to go outside, eat together, and walk through Descanso Gardens. Phones stayed in pockets. Formal titles stayed at the office. And what emerged was something rarely achieved in government org charts: real human connection.
These walks became crucibles of change. Engineers talked with planners. Field staff swapped stories with finance folks. Problems that had been stuck for months began to dissolve – not through memos, but through shared meals and real empathy. Instead of "that’s not my department," people began to ask, how can I help?
This wasn’t just about feel-good team bonding. The Discovery Protocol functioned as a meta-protocol – a cultural operating system that allowed all the other protocols (AMI reform, field data ops, adaptive ditch-building) to actually work. Because people had built trust, they could move faster. Take risks. Ask questions. Own problems together.
It was part of a broader cultural effort at CVWD to open hearts and minds, recognizing that adaptive infrastructure is not just a technical problem. It’s a human one. And no spreadsheet, no dashboard, no AI model can replace what two people can do over lunch when they actually listen to each other.
The lesson? You don’t rebuild systems without rebuilding the relationships inside them. The Discovery Protocol did just that.
Frontier Protocols: From Water Meters to Street Data
If adaptive infrastructure is about using what you already have in smarter ways, the next frontier of operational improvement is hiding in plain sight: piggybacking sensor networks onto routine field operations.
Here’s one illustrative play:
Install low-cost imagery sensors on district vehicles – meter readers, fire flow testers, water quality samplers.
As they drive their routes, they collect street imagery.
That imagery feeds into a lightweight pipeline to monitor street quality across the district.
You’ve just turned routine workflows into a living map of civic infrastructure.
This isn’t sci-fi. It’s a simple protocol shift: embed sensing into existing work, then route that data into usable, visual insights. Call it embedded observation. Call it ambient infrastructure intelligence. Whatever you call it, it’s efficient, imaginative, and stunningly actionable.
Begin by asking: “Where can we go with what we have?”
The Problem with Protocols We Can’t See
There’s a persistent challenge with government operations.
The implicit, unspoken protocols for how things are “supposed” to get done? They’re not just murky. They’re mythological. There's folklore around processes and policies. Everyone “knows” someone you need to talk to. Everyone has their own spreadsheet, contact list and folder of templates. And the real bottleneck? It’s usually figuring out who actually has the power to say yes.
This isn’t just annoying. It can be operationally paralyzing.
As pointed out by Nadia Asparouhova in her Summer of Protocols research, this is a textbook case of implicit, informal, and inconsistent Kafka Protocols – the worst kind. Even when protocols aren’t written down, people rely on oral tradition. And government becomes a whisper network of “that’s just how we do things.”
Some examples:
Folkloric workflows (“Talk to Janice in Engineering, she knows a guy...”)
Paper files in digital worlds (and vice versa)
Policies that conflict with practices that conflict with what the law actually says
We’re not saying we need 500-page manuals. We’re saying we need clarity. We need protocols that are legible and grounded in reality – not vibes or piles of paperwork.
Too often California government operational records are half digital, half scrolls-in-a-filing-cabinet. That hybrid reality creates protocol drift. You don’t know what’s binding, because you don’t know if it’s in a Word doc, a state law, or Barbara’s head (Barbara retired in 2018).
Take the stormwater ditch: we didn’t even know what permit was truly required. That’s not a compliance issue – it’s an information architecture failure. And it’s why we believe AI can help. Drafting MOUs, summarizing legal frameworks, translating “govspeak” into actionable steps – that’s what the next-gen protocol engine looks like.
So What Do We Do?
Recommendations for Future-Proofing Adaptive Protocols in California and Beyond
Start with Visibility: You can’t fix what you can’t see. Make workflows legible. Use tools like shared spreadsheets, dashboards, or even a routine structured email.
Build from the actual Workflow: If your protocol doesn’t map to how real people do real work, it’s not a protocol – it’s a fantasy.
Streamline Ruthlessly: Focus on the flow. Remove the friction. Question the parts that exist just because “that’s how we’ve always done it.”
Treat Project Retrospectives as Civic Ritual: Don't move on until you've looked back. Every stumble contains the seeds of future resilience, but they need to be attended to.
Use AI as a Protocol Partner: Don’t wait for a moonshot. Start with small wins. Draft documents, summarize email threads, generate checklists. Use the tech to amplify your staff’s judgment.
Design for the Street Level: Protocols shouldn’t live in binders. They should live in trucks, phones, and calendars. Embed them where the real work happens.
Treat Protocols as Civic Infrastructure: They’re not just internal. Good protocols create clarity, transparency, and trust for everyone – from staff to ratepayers.
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