Last week's Protocol Kit launch went great (catch up here if you missed it, and read last week's newsletter for details on how to snag one of the limited-edition physical kits). Here is a picture of the the big 3-ring binder that will hold the physical edition of the kit. Looks great, doesn't it?

And here's a picture of some of the inserts in the first module.

The Module 1 research is already online (only as PDF for the moment, though we're working on other formats), and we're promoting the individual items one by one. In this week's newsletter, we're putting the spotlight on two of the pieces.

First, check out David Lang's essay Standards Make the World. He also did a talk about it in our Town Hall series last week. You can join a forum discussion about it here. The essay is one of the crucial must-read pieces of research from the program, since it bridges the world of industrial age standards-making and the modern world of protocols. For anyone working on modern protocols, it provides invaluable historical context as well as broader insight into standards and protocols entrepreneurship.

Second, check out Nahee Kim's Graphic novel Re-move about navigating memories. Here's a sample spread from it. You can join a forum discussion about it here. This is one of my own personal favorite outputs from the program. Surreal protocol fiction, especially non-textual, is something we need a lot more of. I find it breaks me out of apathetically inhabiting increasingly complex modern technological infrastructure in a UX metaphor bubble.

We hope you enjoy these pieces. We'll be spotlighting more in coming weeks. Please share widely, and do join the conversation on our new discussion forum. It is integrated with the summer of protocols site and is hosted on Discourse, a forum software platform you might already be familiar with. It's open to read, but you have to be logged in to post.

Finally, I want to leave you with my own essay from last week, reflecting on my learnings from the program, In Search of Hardness.