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Where we are — honestly
Two scoreboards run in parallel on a project like this. One is technical; one is relational. The technical board passed. The relational board hasn't started.
Technical: passed
The original kill metric was +15% improvement over GFS on precipitation forecasts at 72-hour lead time in the soybean belt. The current model passes it at +25.7% with confidence intervals that don't cross zero. There is a honest "heavy events" caveat, which is documented openly. The demo is live and reviewable. A technically literate reader can read the demo and form their own judgement in 10 minutes.
Relational: not yet
Zero Paraguayan institutions have evaluated this. Zero cooperatives have used it for a decision. The DMH (Paraguay's national met service) doesn't know it exists. Itaipú Binacional (the dam authority that operates the gauge network we'd want for tighter validation) doesn't know either. The Ministry of Agriculture doesn't know. No newspaper has covered it. No academic has cited it.
That's not a complaint. It's the actual state. The technical work happened first because that's what one person with a computer can do alone. The relational work is what comes next, and it's not something one person with a computer can do alone — especially when that person doesn't speak Spanish and doesn't live in Paraguay.
What changed when I realized this
For most of the last two months I was optimizing the model. There was always one more thing — better calibration, more dates, another ensemble member, a fancier post-processing scheme. Each one promised a few more percentage points. Some of them delivered.
A few weeks ago I noticed the percentage points were no longer the bottleneck. Even at +25.7%, no Paraguayan stakeholder was going to look at it on their own. The bottleneck was that nobody knew the project existed, and the people who could change that — particularly my Paraguayan collaborator — were not consistently following through on the introductions and calls.
The reframe
When the kill metric is "improve RMSE by another point," the work is familiar — write code, run experiments, look at numbers. When the kill metric is "get a cooperative to actually look at this," the work is unfamiliar to me — make calls in Spanish, navigate Paraguayan ministries, build trust over months, accept that file movement is slow.
I can't do that work directly. So I'm hiring someone who can.
What I have (concretely)
- A live, reviewable, mobile-friendly demo.
- A working data pipeline that polls Paraguay's public weather feed every 5 minutes and archives daily.
- One meteorologist collaborator (ex-DMH) who provides credibility but is inconsistent on operational follow-through.
- Detailed knowledge of which doors need to be knocked on (DMH, Itaipú, MAG, soybean cooperatives, US Embassy ag office).
- Drafted Spanish + English outreach letters for each.
- About $1,500 of remaining budget for the relational push.
What I need
- A reliable Spanish-speaking research analyst in Asunción (Paraguay's capital) who can make calls, draft formal letters, and follow up consistently — paid contractor for 90 days.
- One in-country door to actually open. The first cooperative meeting is the moment the project transitions from "research artifact" to "product with a real user."
Next: the plan — three parallel tracks for the next 90 days.