Today is commute day for a bunch of Summer of Protocols researchers. They left Edge City Lanna in Chiang Mai this morning for Bangkok to attend Devcon. For many of the 12,000+ Devcon attendees, this week will comprise a debut for SoP. On Tuesday, program director Tim Beiko will take the Devcon main stage for his talk The Shape of Protocols to Come to present mental models that have emerged from two years of research. In this talk, Tim asks: How can we make sense of things like Ethereum? How should we think about such protocols, which have aspects of money, law, and states﹣defying easy categorization?

Another highlight of the upcoming week is the Hardening the Commons workshop, jointly hosted by both SoP Program Directors and featuring guest speakers Josh Stark, Trent Van Epps, and Sam Chua. The theme of hardened commons is an offshoot of key research from the past two summers, including Capital and Enclosure in Software Commons and Standards Make the World. During the workshop, participants will develop a protocol capability maturity model for a commons of their choice in order to plot a path to durability.

There are several more SoP-affiliated events this week in Bangkok that you should check out:

• Eric Alston (SoP '23) speaks three times this week! Monday 1:30pm @ Parallel Society Congress, Wednesday 2:30pm @ Shielding Summit, and Wednesday 6:20pm @ Devcon stage 1.

• Rafael Fernandez (SoP '23) hosts the Governance Geeks Community Hub at Devcon, daily from 10am to 3pm at the Queen Sirikit National Convention Center.

• Micah Fitch (Webscape Wanderer) & Rithikha Rajamohan (V6A Labs, SoP ‘23) exhibit Collective Social Graph-making at the Edges of Observability, a network graph visualisation prototype and exploration at the Cryptographic Connections Museum. The museum is open throughout the week on Level G and explores how privacy-preserving cryptography can strengthen human connection.

Add the SoP Events calendar to your own Google Calendar to avoid missing out on future events, including virtual salons and meetups in major cities. Also﹣we have posted workshop materials from the past month on the SoP forum, and will continue do so. Winter is around the corner, along with a cycle of deep research and asynchronous collaboration. The forum is like a playground where serious academics, practicing professionals, and hobbyist researchers can explore ideas, share resources, and incubate projects for the protocol century.

Summer Highlights 5/6

In their salon during the September Symposium, Botao Amber Hu and Yisi Liu detailed a protocol for a future where augmented reality (AR) displays are commonplace. Already, big players like Meta, Apple, Snap, and Google are making bets on this tech. With AR lenses on the horizon of consumer markets, it's time to ask questions about standards and protocols. How can these displays interoperate to create shared objects between completely different realities? What would society look like with and without this protocol?

Amber was in Chiang Mai, and is now in Bangkok at Devcon, continuing to turn heads with the bat mask he created for a project called EchoVision.

PILL Exhibition

On-Chain Data Sculptures by Haotian Fang

The on-chain world is shaped by the data we own, and current data visualization tools are not enough for us to actively connect with our data. Do I understand my data? Can I interact with my data? How can I connect with others through my data? We need more diverse representations of data, like these sculptures by Haotian Fang.

Below the Application Programming Interface by Steven Bailey

Below the API explores what it means to be a creator in a world where even the simplest human connections are mediated by AI agents and what sorts of strange effects even the most well-intentioned regulatory protocols may have on our daily lives.