Current Projects

Two projects, one premise

For this fiscal year we have taken our working method from David Whyte's poem "Start Close In." Its counsel, as we read it, is that the useful first step is almost always the nearest one, and that the wider view is something you earn by taking steps from here to there rather than something you arrange in advance. Both of the projects described below begin with a single water company, a single service area, and the ground immediately underfoot.

This is a deliberate answer to a question we ask ourselves, which is whether work and progress at this scale can say anything about water anywhere else.

We think it can, and we would put the case more strongly than that. Water is discussed at continental and global scale, and it is delivered at the scale of a valve, a tank, a road, and a board of neighbors who meet on a Tuesday evening. The complexity that makes water difficult to manage does not live only in the large numbers. Much of it lives in the enormous number of small, particular, locally governed systems that no aggregate view resolves.

It is worth remembering that one of the more durable bodies of thinking we have about governing water collectively came from Elinor Ostrom, who started by studying a few groundwater basins in Los Angeles County in the 1960s.  The principles she drew from them have since been applied to fisheries, forests, and irrigation systems on every continent. The general was assembled from the particular, and not the other way around.

Our two current projects Hydronomics & The Working Map approach the same premise from opposite directions. One project makes many systems legible to each other. The other makes a single system legible to itself. Both start close in.

  • Hydronomics goes wide. It gathers publicly available financial and operational data from small water providers across Southern California and puts it into a consistent, comparable, time-series format, so that operators, boards, and researchers can ask directly from aggregated publicly available data what a unit of water actually costs to deliver in different places, and why the answers differ so much. Water delivery often begins as a hyperlocal enterprise. Insight need not be.

  • The Working Map goes deep. It builds a detailed, layered, community-specific map of one mutual water company's system and the ground around it, using open-source tools, so that the people who collectively own that infrastructure can see it, plan around it, improve it, and share the method with the community next door.