Unbundling is a concept that can be be applied to businesses, organizations, or products about how to decompose a whole unit into individual parts.

Sometimes, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Yet sometimes, not.

I give city governments, or municipalities, the benefit of the doubt; that they are well intentioned, in spirit. And, in the United States, I have enjoyed the relatively luxuries of running water, steady electricity, parks, schools, fire and police departments that are quite responsive.

Yet these municipal functions are brought to life by good people who work within organizations, and those people's time, energy, and action are what animate the actual civic body.

And then there is the organization itself. A dead entity; a corpse. An organization is an abstraction. People work within an organizational construct. A public organization tends to have related legal charters and municipal codes and policies. And these policies are then enacted, as a type of ruleset by individuals.

Over time, public organizations tend to accrete more rules and policies, more responsibilities - either implicitly or explicitly, more financial debt, and more infrastructural debt.

My first 'real' job was working in the Solano County Auditor's Office, and I was young enough to not know better than to ask very basic questions, like Why?

• Why are certain expenditures for certain people justifiable?
• Why don't we publish data online in real-time, every day?
• Why are there certain rules that get ignored or selectively acknowledged?
• Why do certain people get more access and attention even though their ideas and behaviors aren't better than others?

These questions are not good for the organization.

Certain people who work within the organization use the organization as a shield, or justification for what otherwise would not be acceptable.