A simple ARGO FAQ

ARGO = aka Advanced Research in Government Operations is a startup nonprofit that builds, operates and maintains pioneering data infrastructure to transform how water reliability, street quality, education, or other basic public services are delivered.

SCUBA = (no aka) A data model and data warehouse that standardizes urban water data from multiple sources into a consistent data structure which facilitates comparative research and evaluation.

SQUID = aka Street Quality IDentification (Device) is a low-cost approach that uses a mobile imaging device (a cellphone or a raspberry pi + camera) and integrates street imagery with accelerometer data to provide a next-generation, digital, and ground truthed pavement condition index to help cities maintain streets in radically new ways.

CaDC = aka California Data Collaborative is a coalition of California water utilities who work in close collaboration with ARGO to build data infrastructure and support their peers in meeting their reliability objectives and serve the public good.

Data Collaborative = Data Collaboratives are a new form of collaboration, beyond the public-private partnership model, in which participants from different sectors — in particular companies -  exchange their data to create public value.
via Gov Lab

KRAKEN = ETL is a mythical data beast for most municipal/public service delivery systems. ARGO's unique ETL pipeline hosted in the cloud attempts to tame that beast which we call Kraken. Kraken leverages open source tools to offer a better, faster, and cheaper way of ingesting, parsing and publishing "public data" towards actionable outcomes.

Public Data = Data that is used to manage a public resource. All open data can be public data but all public data need not be open.

Argo ship logo = A reference to the Greek mythical story of Jason and the Argonauts who embark on what was assumed to be the impossible mission of retrieving the golden fleece.
The ship, represents to us, a symbolic vessel of discovery and transformation to navigate the the Digital Tsunami or waves of change.

Argonauts = The crew aboard the ship who are committed to helping us create a sustainable vessel to help

Wave / Digital Tsunami = The change and disruption brought about by "software eating the world" forces, the growing influences of private equity and Wall Street on the delivery of core public services.

Friends of ARGO = those fine folks helping to pitch in and be a deck hand on ARGO.