Fall Agenda

We have a lot coming up and there are plenty of ways to get involved! First and foremost, the SoP Forum is open access – anyone can explore topics, share research, or annotate SoP essays + artifacts and lectures. As well, there have been spontaneous local meetups, from London to Montreal. If you'd like some support organizing one, drop a post on the forum.

Starting next week, several members of SoP will be at Edge City Lanna in Chiang Mai, Thailand. At least two SoP alum, Toby Shorin and Timber Schroff (me), will be there the whole month, with more joining later in the month. If you'll be there, be sure to reach out!

We're hosting another Protocol Worlds workshop, featuring an updated version of the Tensions Game, during the fourth week of Lanna. The Tensions Game was play tested for the first time at Edge City Esmeralda earlier this year, and we're excited to bring it back in an enhanced v2.0 form. Attendees at Lanna can join the game anytime during the month to explore how tensions and protocols can reshape how they think about problems in their field.

Up next is Devcon, in Bangkok from November 12th to 15th, where Venkatesh Rao and Tim Beiko will host a workshop on protocolics and hardening the commons. More details on that coming soon.

Reviewing the 2024 Symposium

We wrapped up the 2024 Protocol Symposium last Saturday! Attendees practiced their protocol thinking across two weeks of salons hosted by the SoP24 cohort. During the plenary talk, we offered three lenses as a "starter pack" for people to accelerate their learning:

• Technological Tangled Banks,

• Erdős-Whitehead Time, and

• The Kitspace of Civilization.

Learn about these concepts in the video below.

Several other themes emerged from the symposium, thanks to lively Q&A sessions during the salons. Path dependence was a common concept. First responses to floods, fires, or security breaches become a default strategy for late responders, even if the first response is flawed. Rules about how we vote, once agreed upon, are difficult to change. A second, similar theme was timelines – protocols are engineered arguments about how to do things. Improving a protocol requires not only reengineering, but changing people's minds with a new argument.

Literacy also came up a lot. How do you see protocols? Answers ranged from immersion within a system, to structured protocol watching exercises, to anthropological observation. There was a consistent emphasis on interacting with the real world, rather than limiting yourself to the study of protocols on paper. As Rich McDowell put it:

"Protocols can look good on paper but the real world shows the wrinkles."

A fourth emergent theme was protoco-ethics. The salon on end-to-end encryption in ActivityPub illustrated that even the most technical protocols have difficult social questions wrapped into their design. Privacy and transparency are features, but also evergreen philosophical questions. Similarly, the lenses through which we examine problems and form theories are value-laden. Danielle and Celeste pointed out that "Looking at sea level rise through a lens of risk is not a neutral choice."

The highly technical nature of protocols allows for recombination; mixing them or extending them to affect outcomes. ActivityPub can be extended for privacy, old and new prescribed burn protocols can be spliced together, or augmented reality protocols can set standards to create persistent objects across metaverses.

Stay tuned for more recordings from the 2024 Protocol Symposium, news about SoP events, and project spotlights!