Scooter sharing caught cities flat-footed. This is not in dispute. But now cities are pushing back and trying to get organized, banding together to form a new coalition to figure out what the hell to do with all these electric doohickeys littered across their streets.

The Open Mobility Foundation, which is what the coalition is called, already has a long list of goals: improving safety; making sure dockless vehicles are equitably distributed across cities; ensuring scooters aren’t blocking the sidewalks or generally effecting the quality of life in cities; analyzing terabytes of data produced by scooters; and guaranteeing the privacy of scooter riders is protected. That last one is going to be a bit sticky, given the agency spearheading this new foundation is the Los Angeles Department of Transportation.

In case you don’t remember, LADOT created a digital tool called the Mobility Data Specification (MDS), to help cities manage all the scooter and bike-share companies hitting their streets. It uses location data from scooters and bikes to inform transportation policy, such as where to place bike lanes, as well as enforcement actions, like which company’s customers aren’t following the rules of the road. Reportedly, the data would not be shared with police without a warrant, would not contain personal identifiers, and would not be subject to public records requests.

Unsurprisingly, cities love MDS — it has since spread to 50 cities across the US and a dozen around the globe — but the scooter and bike companies weren’t thrilled. Uber, which owns the dockless scooter and bike company Jump, said it would lead to “an unprecedented level of surveillance” and vowed to stop it. (A state bill that would preempt cities from regulating micromobility companies, blocking the use of MDS, is currently being debated in the California state legislature.)

MDS is the brainchild of Seleta Reynolds, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation’s general manager. As more cities adopt MDS as a crucial tool in managing micromobility companies, the foundation can help create some consistency around its use — because today’s scooters can quickly turn into tomorrow’s something-else-entirely.

“That business model, where on-demand mobility is available through your smartphone, the form factor is going to keep changing,” Reynolds told The Verge. “It’s going to be a scooter, it’s going to be a pod, it’s going to be a jetpack, it’s going to be whatever it’s going to be... one of the core pieces of MDS is how do you build something that can work for whatever the next device is, whether it’s something that moves on the ground or in the sky?”

And with huge tech companies lobbying governments to prevent cities from collecting these data points, she realized that “formalizing the governance structure was important to protect it, because it is the seed right now. And we have a vision for where we think it could go.”

The Open Mobility Foundation counts among its founding members Austin, Chicago, Los Angeles, Louisville, Miami-Dade County, Minneapolis, New York City (both the Department of Transportation and the Taxi and Limousine Commission), Philadelphia, Portland, San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Monica, Seattle, and Washington, DC. It is being co-founded by the Rockefeller Foundation, and will be advised by the NewCities Foundation.

Reynolds acknowledged that data collection and privacy will be a “day-one work of the foundation and probably a forever work of the foundation.” LADOT published its own privacy principles as it relates to its collection of scooter location data, and Reynolds says part of the foundation’s efforts will be to hold scooter companies to those same principles.

“We’re going to collect the bare minimum amount of data that we need, we’re going to apply aggregation and minimization techniques to it, we’re not going to store it for longer than we need it,” she said.

Currently, there are a patchwork of rules across the country related to management and operation of dockless scooter companies — and they seem to be changing every week. Nashville just announced that it was banning electric scooters after a man with twice the legal limit of alcohol in his system was killed while riding a scooter. Uber pulled its Jump bikes and scooters from San Antonio, Texas, recently after the city proposed changes that would cut its fleet in half. One of the last major holdouts, New York state, recently legalized electric scooters, but will allow cities to write their own rules for scooter companies to follow.

As cities get organized, the scooter companies may find themselves subject to more rules and more enforcement. That might be a drag, especially for those who believe that scooters can get more people out of cars and help solve the last mile challenge.

Reynolds sees MDS and the Open Mobility Foundation as an opportunity for cities to share best practices, but also hear from the micromobility companies about their concerns. It’s important to get talking, she says, before the scooters all turn into jetpacks.