Happy December, and welcome to deep research season. Summer was a blitz. SoP24 grantees improved real-world protocols, conducted important studies, and gathered field notes. Then there was a busy fall of events, workshops and meetups. This year's cohort hosted the flagship Protocol Symposium to present their summer projects, cementing SoP as the first interdisciplinary community of protocol research and practice. In fact, multiple alumni from both cohorts have started protocol ventures. To name a few:

• Tom Coates and Evan Prodromou launched the Social Web Foundation earlier this year.

• Toby Shorin studies emerging health protocols at Care Culture.

• Eric Alston continues his work on killswitch protocols and protocol economics.

With summer long gone, the winter arc begins. It's a great time of year for research as leisure activity (a phrase coined by Celine Nguyen). Less travel and the usual holiday-driven downshift in work tempo means more time for reading and writing. While we work behind the scenes to upgrade distributed research infrastructure, we've created a temporary study group for the community to hang out and do research.

The Protocol Study Group will run for the next eight weeks. The main feature is a group chat for sharing ideas and resources, plus two calls per week. One call will be a themed discussion about protocol studies, the other call will be a dedicated writing block. You can attend both, just one or the other, or even simply participate asynchronously via the group chat. If you'd like to join, please apply here! The plan is for discussions to loosely follow this topic schedule.

One way to think about Summer of Protocols is as an intellectual playground or an idea startup. This essay by Celine Nguyen, research as leisure activity, points out three aspects of independent research. These also apply to and help characterize SoP as a growing community:

"Research as leisure activity is...directed by passions and instincts...exuberantly undisciplined or antidisciplinary...and involves as much rigor as necessary."

Past grantees and contributors to SoP have liberally worked across domains, followed highly variable workflows, and rose to the challenges posed by their research topics. People tend to explore questions based on their interests, rather than by following a research agenda. This makes for a dialectic process between the researcher and their work. Individual interests drive research, and discoveries influence personal development.

"I find myself turning this phrase—research as leisure activity—over and over again, especially as I plan out what I want to read this summer, what I want to write, and who I want to be at the end of the season."

These are interesting questions for any budding protocolist or protocol entrepreneur to ask themselves. Research can be used to refine arguments, build new tools for thought, or even reinvent yourself. Another key quote from Nguyen's article is with regards to the question: who qualifies as a researcher?

There’s something deeply compelling to me about the idea that research—in some form—can be done by anyone with a serious commitment to intellectual inquiry."

The advantage that leisure researchers have is freedom to cross academic lines. Which is exactly what an emerging field needs. If a science of protocols was formulated based on just one industry or academic domain, it would be incomplete. And it's still early﹣protocols are undervalued as a research topic, despite having clearly established themselves as a first-class concept in modern life:

There is a wealth of interesting topics to leisurely explore this winter. Some ideas we've heard recently: study emerging health protocols; synthesize work from SoP23 and SoP24; conduct follow-on research from an existing project; formulate a history of protocols; design protocols for community management; experiment with safety protocols for social media use. That's just the tip of the iceberg.

Interested in an eight-week experiment in research as leisure activity? The winter Protocol Study Group starts next week and is free to join, but requires a short application.