A bunch of odds and ends cluttering my brain, blog posts that are half written in my mind that are in the way:

Quoting Luis Villa on accessing the open data commons

We’ve been talking about open data for a long time, but since using data is hard to consume and manipulate, open data has never been as big as open code. But if open data + vibecoding = powerful, does that make open data way more relevant?

Yes.

See graph above.

I always have had more questions (sometimes ill-posed, sometimes well-thought-through) than my coding abilities can execute. (See also domestic wells below.)

Source

The Commons

I pay for a subscription to Newspapers.com in order to have access to a large portion of my written work. I view what I have written over the course of my life – newspapers, books, blogs – as a mindful and intentional contribution to the information commons. But this aligns poorly with the formal economic and legal structures – “institutions” as we might define them for our water resources students, the rules that serve as the foundation for the more common-language definitions of “institutions” that might apply here, the organizations of publishing – newspapers and book publishers and Inkstain.

The newspaper paid me well (it wasn’t a lot of money, but I viewed it as a fair transaction) and owned what I produced. I pay now for the privilege of reading it. The books are more complicated. I choose to make Inkstain freely available.

Derrida and Adorno, two philosophers I have been poking at of late, are helping me think about the definitional challenges – not “the commons” in particular, but what we’re doing when we attach words/concepts to things, the cultural quicksand beneath our linguistic feet.

That Postcard

Found this in a stack of old Dad stuff. It is my origin story, my father as a young artist in a moment of profound change. In laying the groundwork for his life, it laid the groundwork for mine.

Domestic Wells

See Luis’s comment above about vibe coding and open data.

I am not sure what to do with this. I can’t unsee it.

I’m out on the epistemological thin ice here, but as a journalist I spent much of my life working in areas where that ice is thin, it’s where the interesting stuff happens.

Ostrom and the Colorado River

I’ve mostly been grabbing the handrail and trying not to fall off as my Wilburys friends, in what we see as a discourse vacuum, charge ahead with our critique of Colorado River governance:

• Tripwires and the Lee Ferry delivery numbers
• The need for near term actions
• Essential Pillars for Colorado River Governance

In a 2011 paper, Elinor Ostrom laid out one of the final versions of her “design principles,” characteristics of successful institutional arrangements for collective action around natural resource systems. We spend a lot of time on this in the class I teach with Bob Berrens each fall for UNM graduate students. It was at the heart of my book Water is For Fighting Over, and it is at the heart of Ribbons of Green, the book Bob and I wrote that UNM Press will be publishing next year.

(Did I mention how much I love teaching?)

There are two design principles in particular that are at the heart of the current Colorado River challenges. Quoting from Ostrom 2011:

• How are conflicts over harvesting and maintenance to be resolved?
• How will the rules affecting the above be changed over time with changes in the performance of the resource system, the strategies of participants, and external opportunities and constraints?

There is an additional principle from Ostrom that shows up over and over in her work, that’s embedded in her explicit principles: a need for a shared understanding of the quantification of the resource.

I am thinking through how these ideas relate to the current Colorado River challenges. Those challenges suggest what I had thought was a functional system lacks these three things. I am thinking a lot about what I described in 2015 when I was writing Water is For Fighting Over, versus what I see happening in 2025. What has changed, or what did I miss?

In which I get my first ambulance ride

Burying the lead here (I always hated the artifice of the journalistic jargon-spelling “lede”), but I had occasion recently to spend a few days in the bubble of the medical-industrial complex. I’m fine, I think, but the identification of a “new” life-changing risk is in actuality the identification of a risk that has probably been there all along. It’s just that now I know about it.

Which means I can do some stuff to reduce that risk, including magical pharmacology (“If I crash,” I told my bike-riding buddy Sunday, “be sure to tell the EMT’s!”) and also saying more “nos” to the stresses of my life of public engagement. My contributions to the commons are not without personal cost, as well as the personal benefits I derive. (Sorry, J.)

It also means that I spend a lot of time thinking about this (new?) risk. This is subtext to all the rest of what I just wrote.