The Plan: Strategic Plan for AB 1755, April 2018
DWR and the AB 1755 Partner Agency Team (DWR, State Water Board, CDFW, Water Quality Monitoring Council, plus OPR, CNRA, GovOps and the Delta Stewardship Council) answered the statute with a vision of "useful data for sound, sustainable water resource management." They built it as a federation of open data portals, not a single new database.
Four goals, in order of ambition
A front-loaded schedule
Each dot is one strategic action, placed at its planned date. Hollow dots carry a year with no quarter, and the arrows mark actions planned as "ongoing." The schedule assumed a governance structure and protocols by mid-2018 and a functioning federated platform by 2020.
Source: Strategic Plan for AB 1755, April 2018, pp. 6–14. Data: strategic_actions.csv.
Federation, the central bet
The plan used a library analogy. Each portal keeps its own collection, and a shared "card catalog" lets anyone find any book. The first step was to federate data.ca.gov (GovOps) and data.cnra.ca.gov (CNRA). Other platforms would join voluntarily as they adopted AB 1755 protocols. That borrows directly from the Aspen Institute's 2017 Internet of Water principles: federated hubs, data stewardship staying with producers, and a backbone organization that coordinates without governing.
Life cycle: statute vs. plan
The statute targets one stage. The plan, adapted from DataONE, claims all of them.
Highlighted: the stage the statute's requirements map to most directly (plan p. 1).
Commitments the plan made about itself
- An implementation plan with delivery timelines and metrics would follow.
- The strategic plan would be updated every five years, in sync with the California Water Plan (2023 would have been the first update).
- The Partner Agency Team "or future AB 1755 governance structure" would own implementation.
Plate IV scores how those commitments and the 49 actions turned out.