Sarah's talk marks the final Town Hall hosted by one of last summer's researchers.

This week, the 2024 cohort will meet to review the ProtocolKit. Building a shared set of terms should help teams orient in their respective spaces and find common threads between their projects.

Josh Davis designed a nice information page with details on all grantees and their projects. Check it out and get to know them! We'll also spotlight individual projects here, in the Protocolized newsletter, every week.

At the end of May, around 30 people from the extended Summer of Protocols community – SoP researchers from 2023 and 2024, a variety of participants from the Southeast Asia region, and researchers from Singapore’s Center for Strategic Futures, will gather in Singapore for the 2-day Datus and Nusas workshop, which aims to discover and begin codifying the unique principles and practices of cooperation and multilateral governance that characterize the Nusantara region.

We will post glimpses of the workshop on this forum thread, starting with the pre-readings for the workshop attendees. Anyone is invited to read and discuss.

P.I.G. Highlight: Autonomous Realities

Yisi Liu (Left): Co-founder and CTO at Mask Network. Research fellow at the Institute of Network Society at China Academy of Arts. Focusing on bringing data ownership and privacy back to users with the power of cryptography and permissionlessness.

Botao Amber Hu (Right): Director of Reality Design Lab. XR Researcher, Designer, and Educator. A digital nomad located in Shanghai and NYC.

Their goal is to improve protocols for interactions in mixed realities:

We’ve proposed two speculative protocols for a future where MR headsets are common and users want to share their mixed realities. The first, “FingerSync,” is an embodied mixed reality protocol. It’s designed to establish shared mixed reality sessions with Proof-Carrying Data, inspired by the concept of the ancient “secret handshake.”

We aim to keep the shared mixed reality layer persistent and autonomous, even when users aren’t actively viewing it. To model such layered and intertwined futures, we’ve suggested a meta-protocol, “Autonomous Realities”. This is based on the “Autonomous World” and “Zupass” concepts, potentially serving for experiential network states.

Reading Group

If you missed the signup form, here the info that was sent out:

• Date: Thursday, May 23rd at 3PM Eastern Time / 12PM Pacific Time

• Zoom: https://calendar.app.google/kMUDXMTN55cANzrP6 

• Reading: Exit to Protocol: A Future After Retirement by Shuya Gong (Link)

• Format:

  • Call will be about 45 minutes. 

  • Initial 15 minutes are for silent reading. I'll do a quick intro since it's the first one.

  • Audio only; no need for cameras.

  • We'll do a round of comments from everyone before opening a group discussion.

Content Catch-Up

Last week's guest talk was a Q&A with Varun Srinivasan, cofounder of Farcaster. The topics were technology, architecture, and social networks.

"We're building two things... Farcaster, which is the protocol that helps different participants in the network connect and interact, just email is the protocol you use to send messages. We're also building Warpcast, which is the first client you can use to access this protocol. You can think of it as the Gmail to your email."

Big thanks to the YouTube audience, who asked a ton of great questions. Visit the SoP channel to view the recording.

And here are some of the top threads from the forum this week:

• Will AI use strange protocols to revolutionize mathematics?

• A secretive story about the first woman to pilot a 747.

• How prison gangs use protocols as governance mechanisms.

• Petty protocol compliance in the city of Seaside.

A bunch of teams started posting updates on their projects in the SoP24 Research category. You can dig into those here.