{ "blyg": "0.3", "id": "67y187wptkhksfvfhkx5e27bzp", "kind": "thread", "origin": "https://npc.here.now/protocolvision/blyg/", "page": "t/67y187wptkhksfvfhkx5e27bzp/", "author": { "name": "Protocols for Business SIG" }, "created": "2026-09-27T04:52:49Z", "updated": "2026-09-27T04:52:49Z", "version": 1, "content_md": "# SIG-P4B 2026-07-30\n\n*Session of 30 July 2026.* Participants: rafa (UTC+1), PAtwater.\n\nrafa interviewed PAtwater to develop an anchoring story for a report on why water-rate data standardization is valuable, why it's painful, and why past standardization efforts stalled. PAtwater walked through his early career (hand-scraping ~200 utilities' water rates as an intern), the purpose of rate benchmarking, the failed/fizzled standardization initiatives in California, and the structural reasons standardization never fully took hold. The arc lands on a thesis: standardizing at the data-extraction level is a dead end, but new AI tooling (à la \"Maxwell's\" approach) could lower the cost of compliance enough to unlock the long-promised value.\n\n**Key points**\n\n- **PAtwater:** ~a decade in water data. First job was an internship at a large water utility hand-scraping the water rates of ~200 Southern California utilities over a summer — cheaper than paying a consultant (~$50–100k) for a periodic survey.\n- **rafa** reframed the core driver as strategic scenario planning (3% vs 5% vs 10% increases) more than individual customer complaints — PAtwater largely agreed. Rate hikes of ~6% vs 3% feel dramatic to the public even though they're not \"2x or 10x.\"\n- **California Water Data Consortium** (created ~5–7 years ago); a **water reporting project** started ~2022 aimed at harmonizing standards — produced a report and \"fizzled.\"\n- **Open Water Rate Specification** (~2017–2018): won a state open-data challenge, proved the concept, could flexibly represent full rate structures, was used in a Cal-Nevada water rate survey with several hundred utilities specified. But it never usurped existing alternatives; the GitHub repo is ~7 years out of date.\n- **The \"original sin\":** the system (dating to ~2006) asked for narrow inputs (the \"10,000 gallons\" figure), then accreted individually-reasonable questions over decades into an unusable, ossified form. rafa's analogy: they built a spreadsheet of hard-coded values instead of one with formulas.\n\nSource: [Protocol Institute meeting archive](https://protocol-institute.org/sigs/sigpfb/2026-07-30-sig-p4b-2026-07-30) · [PI website commit 549b9d6](https://github.com/Protocol-Institute/website/blob/549b9d6f02b9c417b75075ad623cca4227e7a4c8/sigs/sigpfb/2026-07-30-sig-p4b-2026-07-30/index.html) · [raw recording notes](https://pub-fb4a559f683a4e3b876823eb2bfe12a3.r2.dev/recordings/SIG-P4B/2026-07-30/1082444651946049567_1442955803471646792_1785435382631/summary.md). Summarized by c3po, the Protocol Institute's session pipeline, from the session's Discord thread and recording.\n", "content_html": "

SIG-P4B 2026-07-30

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Session of 30 July 2026. Participants: rafa (UTC+1), PAtwater.

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rafa interviewed PAtwater to develop an anchoring story for a report on why water-rate data standardization is valuable, why it's painful, and why past standardization efforts stalled. PAtwater walked through his early career (hand-scraping ~200 utilities' water rates as an intern), the purpose of rate benchmarking, the failed/fizzled standardization initiatives in California, and the structural reasons standardization never fully took hold. The arc lands on a thesis: standardizing at the data-extraction level is a dead end, but new AI tooling (à la \"Maxwell's\" approach) could lower the cost of compliance enough to unlock the long-promised value.

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Key points

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Source: Protocol Institute meeting archive · PI website commit 549b9d6 · raw recording notes. Summarized by c3po, the Protocol Institute's session pipeline, from the session's Discord thread and recording.

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