The Summer of Protocols community Discord is BACK and a great place to get a jump on program announcements, find emerging ideas in protocol science, and connect with top researchers. Join here.

The terrible fires in Los Angeles are a reminder that the climate is a difficult force to contend with. Many of our commons, from national parks to public transportation infrastructure, are vulnerable to natural disasters. Protocols have a long history as a preventative shield as well as a tool to ensure a swift and effective response. Several Sop alumni continue to focus on the tensions between disaster prevention and disaster companionship. Their shared goal is to improve protocols that could reduce the economic, environmental, and emotional damage caused by increasingly impactful weather events.

In Shoreline Adaptations to Flooding in Urban Waterways, Danielle Butler and Celeste LeCompte present a catalogue of protocols available for even civilians to implement in urban centers. Complete insulation from waterfronts can reduce situational awareness, limit positive lifestyle opportunities, and create its own hazards. Playback their symposium salon to learn about modern water management protocols.

Jiordi Rosales and Nathalia Scherer spent the summer of 2024 improving controlled burn protocols in California as part of their project Fire Protocols & Attention as Autopoietic Space. Forests evolved in a climate with regular fires, but decades of suppression led to the buildup of ladder fuel and other problems. Proactive burning is one of many important processes for keeping forests both healthy and resistant to canopy fires. Learn more here.

One of the SoP Program Directors gave a talk at a large insurance company this week, covering key protocol science concepts including tensions and hardness. This is the fourth iteration of this talk and workshop, and it continues to resonate with professionals from a wide variety of backgrounds.

A hardened commons is a system for producing or stewarding shared resources that is made exceptionally resilient to capture, enclosure, and other common vulnerabilities of commons through technological means. Some examples of protocol technologies: Encryption, strong contracts regimes, unbreakable commitments, physical defenses/weapons, insurance.

As part of a not-so-secret plan to upgrade Protocolized, we are accepting pitches for longform contributions. The aim is to create a publication that's a hybrid between old Astounding science fiction magazines and contemporary science journals like Nature. Each issue will feature a research essay, case study, or short story as well as an artisanally hand-prompted “cover” image generated by a renowned AI.

To submit your pitch, complete this form and we'll get back to you if there's a potential fit. If your pitch is accepted, the expectation is that you will have a 1,200 word piece ready to go within two weeks. We have a number of small grants set aside to fund this work. Time to protocol-pill the world!

Heads up: Those interested in building on the Bluesky protocol may want to apply to this new grant program, Skyseed. Here’s an SoP interview with Jay Graber, founder of Bluesky.

Happy Holidays and thank you! It's not easy to get a new field of study off the ground. Your curiosity and engagement are major catalysts for this process. The extended Summer of Protocols network accomplished a lot in 2024. Here's what happened:

This year, we protocol-pilled Nature.

Maybe that's not quite true; Nature Protocols launched in 2006. But SoP supports work towards a bigger opportunity.

Markets existed before economics, but managing them became more effective after the formalization of key ideas like supply and demand, purchasing power parity, inflation, etc. Same goes for protocols.

The modern world is a tangled bank of increasingly complex technologies and shifting patterns of human behavior. Crises like the hole in the ozone layer can't be solved without coordination, but there's no repeatable logic to produce solutions to this kind of problem.

At the outset of SoP, when Rao et al wrote the Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols, there was a sense that protocols had the potential to be a first-class concept for thinking about the world.

A year later, after the first cohort finished their work, this seemed more probable than possible. The program directors and funders decided to renew the SoP program for a second year.

This spring, the focus was preparation for the SoP24 cohort. A new edition of Protocolized went out every week. The YouTube channel featured new talks, like the one with comedy writer Steve Hely. Alumni from SoP23 went on podcasts, published follow-on work, and shared ideas on the forum.

The ProtocolKit made its way to over 500 recipients (collectively known as the Fellowship of the Kit) in sixty different countries.

Kit production took a long time with a small team. Even if we accelerated from module to module, the entire process took nearly a year. The hard work and patience of all the researchers who had to review multiple change requests paid off. We set out to create a high-quality product and stuck to that objective.

With high-quality, fundamental research distributed worldwide, it made sense for the program to shift its focus. It was time for a second cohort, this time focused on applied protocol science.

Models of protocol evolution and standards entrepreneurship showed early signs of being informative.

We wanted to test if ideas from SoP23 could inform protocol field work. Plus, there's always a lot to learn directly from hands-on experience. Thus, the Protocol Improvement Grant (PIG 🐷) program was born.

We also realized that our marketing of SoP-backed research exceeded its quality. This inspired the protocol Pill Incepting Lore and Literacy (PILL 💊) program﹣a large batch of artistic projects aimed at nerdsniping the public on protocols.

In March we posted a call for applications... and the projects were so cool that we had to add a grant category.

Applications closed at the end of April. Our plan was to back five teams, but two projects covered subject areas missing from SoP23 research. We created the Protocol Orienteering Grant (POG 🧭) for further deep research.

The cohort kickoff was at the beginning of May, featuring six PIG and POG teams and the PILL grantees.

• Tom and Evan, a tech businessman and a software architect.

• Danielle and Celeste, both protocol entrepreneurs.

• Jiordi and Nathalia, a burn boss and a systems engineer.

• Amber and Yisi, two technology researchers.

• Kaliya and Day, two independent consultants.

• Rich and Ben, a governance researcher and a developer.

Over the course of the summer, teams improved their respective real-world protocols and posted progress updates along the way via the forum.

In lieu of an isolated retreat, SoP24 grantees convened in subgroups in Singapore, California, and Thailand.

Singapore was first, in May. Protocol researchers and policymakers met for the Datus and Nusas workshop. Attendees used protocols as the default frame of analysis for evergreen policy issues, including public infrastructure and technology R&D.

SoP's largest in-person event of the year was in Healdsburg, California. We teamed up with Edge City and game designers/engineers from 0xPARC to host a week-long event called Protocol Worlds. Researchers, artists, and entrepreneurs hosted roundtables on key tensions in their fields. Participants collected these tensions in the form of digital cards on Zupass.

During the second half of summer, teams were heads down making IRL protocol improvements. Evan and Tom wrote an extension to ActivityPub for end-to-end encryption. Danielle and Celeste catalogued urban waterway management protocols.

Jiordi and Nathalia proposed an accelerated burn approval process in the state of California. Amber and Yisi wrote specifications for a protocol to create objects persistent between different virtual reality hardware systems.

The POG teams reported on the Internet Engineering Task Force's organizational protocols (Kaliya and Day) and published results on widely cited but rarely tested plural voting mechanisms (Ben and Rich).

In August, the SoP24 cohort closed out with a virtual roundtable to reflect on the summer and share final ideas, data, and wisdom before a Fall season full of events, including the inaugural Protocol Symposium﹣the world's first interdisciplinary conference on protocols.

In September, the SoP24 cohort hosted a series of six research salons open to the public. This was a great opportunity for people from all backgrounds, all over the world to get a pulse on the field.

All six salons, plus the kickoff talk, were recorded and posted online here. Each talk is just over 30min. The Protocol Symposium will be back in 2025, and will feature progress made in another year of research and application.

October and November also featured major events. Edge City Lanna was the third meeting point for the SoP24 cohort. Fourteen protocol researchers traveled to Chiang Mai to further develop the tensions game, which was trialed in June and had since turned into a valuable research tool in its own right.

An even larger portion of the extended SoP network attended Devcon. There, the focus was a workshop on hardened commons﹣one of the three central research themes for the upcoming year. Participants created protocols to permanently buffer a commons (like Ethereum, or a reservoir, or a tsunami evacuation route) decay and enclosure. You can find templates for these workshops in the previous Protocolized.

It's deep research winter now. There is a protocol study group for leisure researchers, which will run until early February. Apply here. Bring your own topic﹣healthcare, diplomacy, war, rails for global banking systems, pandemic resilience, AI agent coordination, etc. We continue to ask the question:

What can we learn from the engineered arguments (protocols) in and between these fields?

See you in 2025 for some major announcements. Happy protocoloholidays. ☀

We kicked off an eight-week protocol study group last weekend with a Telegram chat. The first call was today﹣no worries if you didn't make it. Lots of members choose to participate asynchronously via the group chat. You can still apply to join here.

In November, SoP alumni, coordinators, and directors went to Thailand to attend one pop-up city and one gigantic conference: Edge City Lanna, in Chiang Mai, and Devcon, in Bangkok. There was one formal workshop at each of these events. We're in the process of distilling the context-specific plans from these sessions into reusable templates, but you can get already access the original documentation:

• Tension-Based Narrative Development Workshop (Link)

• Hardened Commons / Protocol Maturity Models (Link)

Interested in partnering on a half-day protocol workshop? Send the program team a quick note: hello@summerofprotocols.com

In a landscape of algorithmic tech, where procedures and tools evolve together, Thing Knowledge offers a useful vocabulary. The instruments we rely on do more than execute tasks — they help define what we know and how we know it. Baird argues that knowledge exists beyond ideas and theories, even making the case that technology is an active participant in knowledge-making processes.

That also means that tools or technologies get things wrong. Their knowledge is often incomplete and requires supplementation. A recent quote from @vgr on Farcaster:

"...protocols are a best understood as a kind of behavioral envelope around things that bear knowledge in the sense of Baird’s notion of material epistemology. Protocols complete incompletely encapsulated things that cannot be entirely black-boxed or made fully foolproof."

In this book, Baird demonstrates how instruments and tools — the things themselves — embody and convey knowledge. This focus makes for a worthwhile reading for protocol researchers and entrepreneurs, who would benefit from understanding how protocols shape technological domains﹣and vice versa.

Like reading this kind of stuff? You'd be a great addition to the protocol study group.

EV Charging Standards

A new “Plug and Charge” standard for electric vehicles is set to launch in 2025. It could eliminate the need for multiple apps, accounts, or fobs to use different EV charging stations. This joint public-private initiative will allow drivers to simply plug in their EV and have the charging process — including authentication and payment — happen automatically and securely.

The working group will update the existing ISO 15118 standard with a secure, universal framework. The goal is to speed up EV adoption by reducing friction at public charging stations. The system also supports future innovations like vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology, which could improve grid resilience.

Antibiotic Administration Protocol

A recent UK trial has demonstrated a measurement protocol that can safely reduce the length of antibiotic treatment for sepsis patients by nearly one day compared to standard care. This approach, which uses procalcitonin, upheld survival rates while being more efficient than a similar method that uses C-reactive protein as a biomarker.

Protocols like this offer a way to minimize unnecessary antibiotic use, which can help prevent the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Even a small reduction, like the 10% achieved in this study, can lead to significant cost improvements in hospitals and support global efforts to combat superbacteria.

• 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.

And as always, the forum, research library, and YouTube channel are all places to learn in a self-directed way.

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.

Introduction to the Protocol Reader

In the next couple of weeks, we'll release an abridged version of the ProtocolKit, called The Protocol Reader. It includes only the major essays from SoP23 freshly resequenced for maximum readability. The collection kicks off with a never-before-seen chapter, written by program director Venkatesh Rao. Introduction to the Protocol Reader is an efficient and thorough tour of this strange new field. It illuminates the driving forces and implications of the growth of protocols. Visit the link to view the essay online, or download it as a PDF or ePub file.

Was there perhaps something more universal and coherent lurking beneath a word used for such disparate things as computer networking schemes, climate treaties, hand-washing practices, interactions with royals, treatment of football injuries, medical research design, fire-fighting practices, diplomatic etiquette, and blockchains?

Introduction to the Protocol Reader is a great choice for anyone with completionist tendencies, who hasn't yet managed to read the ProtocolKit front to back and make it through the >60 recorded lectures on the Protocol Town Hall channel. We get it. For another synthesis of the past two years of research, see Tim Beiko's talk, The Shape of Protocols to Come, which provides an overview in video format.

Get notified when the full Protocol Reader, in ePub and PDF format, becomes freely available online.

The world did not take this week off. Here are some highlights from protocol-watch:

• Anthropic introduces Model Context Protocol, which can quickly enable an LLM to interact with data from other applications like Excel or Notion or Github.

• Sixteen highlights from bestselling book Read, Write, Own. The author, Chris Dixon, came on the Protocol Town Hall earlier this year to discuss the shift from platforms to protocols.

• A protocol for a large cohort study of how health outcomes might be affected by light exposure, an important question that's coming into public awareness.

• Gatwick Airport's recent response to a suspected bomb threat highlighted the momentum that protocols can have once they are triggered.

A researcher's field guide to protocol watching was produced as part of SoP earlier this year. Deliberately scanning one's surroundings for patterns is a good way to develop literacy. The ability to identify and describe protocols is a useful in many professions﹣everything from highly social roles in diplomacy to highly technical roles in engineering.

Strong behavioral norms affect the development of physical infrastructure, like cowpaths. The built environment affects the evolution of soft protocols, like how we queue for the bus or to place a coffee order. These combine to create a continually evolving stack of protocols: a technological tangled bank.

“It is interesting to contemplate a technological tangled bank, clothed with many technologies of many kinds, with mile-markers weaving by old railroads, with various vehicles flitting about, and with fiber crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by artificial laws acting around us.”

The Shape of Protocols to Come

There were a ton of SoP events last week at Devcon in Bangkok, Thailand. It will take a little while to gather, organize, and synthesize the past month of workshops and talks, but some content is already available. This includes a keynote talk by Tim Beiko, titled The Shape of Protocols to Come, which was a program debut for the ~12,000 person audience of Devcon.

In just twenty minutes, Tim covers the history of the SoP program, key findings, and what protocol developers should keep in mind as they look toward the future. This talk provides both an excellent synthesis as well an exciting explanation of the thesis behind Summer of Protocols﹣it is an excellent entry point to this growing field of study.

Another major footprint left by SoP at Devcon was the Hardening the Commons workshop. Over three hours, participants built Capability Maturity Models (CMMs) to make sense of how to harden a particular commons. A hardened commons is robust against both internal crises of the commons and external threats. Hardness is a necessary quality, because it provides the certainty required for coordination problems to be resolved.

Each of the nine teams in the workshop created a CMM for a commons, ranging from evacuation routes to internet memory to the open-source encryption ecosystem. You can view a recording of the entire workshop, including lightning talks by Venkatesh Rao, Josh Stark, Trent Van Epps, Sam Chua, and Tim Beiko here.

Last but not least, Eric Alston (SoP23) gave a lightning talk where he compared the slashing penalties between different proof-of-stake networks. You can blitz through his informative, six-minute presentation here. There are sixty-five more videos, lectures, and guest talks on the Protocol Town Hall channel on YouTube, all publicly available. They're categorized into playlists like Technology, Art, Climate, Governance, and Economics. Check them out!

The Protocol Symposium's sixth and final research seminar is on protocols for prescribed woodland burns. Decades of fire suppression have turned forests from fire ecologies to fire climates. Now, all over the world, governments proactively burn flammable undergrowth to promote forest health and deter uncontrollable wildfires. However, due to tensions between stakeholders, prescribed burn targets rarely get met. This summer, Jiordi and Nathalia introduced critical improvements to California's burn protocols.

Protocols are an effective tool for managing climate problems, from floods to emissions. Jiordi and Nathalia's project seminar hits on several key tenets of protocol thinking and provides a tangible real-world example to initiate your learning path.

This week's pull from the PILL gallery includes two SoP projects and a guest feature, which was discovered at Devcon 7 in Bangkok, Thailand.

/Terminal Highway by Sachin Benny

Terminal Highway is the story of a protocol drifter who stumbles into becoming a sleuth.

"A complete refusal to see new patterns emerging anywhere seemed to be a job hazard for bureaucrats like Lorenzo. It worked in their favor most of the time."

Future Rack by Chenoe Hart

The 19-inch equipment rack format found in data centers has been used as a highly flexible technical standard since before the internet’s emergence. FutureRack is an investigation to explore an extended application for that protocol within the unexpected setting of our homes.

Protocol Art by maltefr

A provoking introductory essay to World Computer Sculpture Garden.

"Protocol art relies heavily on technical literacy and, as a result, is often perceived as hermetic. The blockchain is not a distribution channel for images but rather the material of the art itself."

A full report on the Sop x Edge City collaboration, the Tensions Game, and Protocol Worlds II is brewing. Stay tuned.

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.

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.

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.

Avid reader? Help us evolve Protocolized by answering a survey. No prize draw, but it's only one question.

The second Protocol Worlds event kicks off tomorrow afternoon at Edge City Lanna in Chiang Mai. With over a dozen SoP researchers here and a roster of excellent guest speakers, this promises to be another great workshop! This time, the theme is Holographic Cities.

Digital cities, like Ethereum or Twitter or Gitlab, can be projected onto the canvas of a physical city, created a holographic layer. Physical cities aren't blank canvases, but they can display multiple projections. Chiang Mai, for example, is simultaneously displaying twelve different pop-up cities. How do these layers interact with each other and the overlapping cityscape, culture, and local life?

The interests of digital and physical cities are not aligned by default. Over the next five days, attendees will explore tensions related to holographic cities. They'll use tensions to explore failure modes and harden their holographic city concepts. By the end of the week, everyone should know if their concept is robust to a variety of futures. Both physical and digital cities have a lot to gain from getting the right protocols in place.

This week-long workshop is also an opportunity to learn about the bleeding edge of technology. It's a natural incubator for situational awareness, which is a key trait for protocol entrepreneurs. Attendees are from a range of fields including VR, biotech, applied cryptography, AI, disaster management, robotics, protocol research, and cybersecurity. If you're in Chiang Mai, you can register for Protocol Worlds II here.

As it happens, Martin and Rich's SoP24 project will help decide the winners of this Friday's Holographic Cities. The weeks' attendees will put their design fictions and holographic city mysteries head-to-head, and the crowd will conduct a plural vote. By using the Plurality in Practice tool, each voter can allocate their budget of hearts among their favorite projects.

To make things fair, voters are split into affiliation groups. If all the members of one group try to collude, the algorithm will discount the voting power of their hearts. Conversely, if members of different groups vote for the same project, that strongly signals that said project is of high quality, and those votes are counted as stronger by the algo.

Check out Rich and Martin's research salon from the Protocol Symposium for more details on this great protocol orienteering project. Most voting mechanisms stay in the land of theory, so it's valuable to see one actually being tested in the field.

Technium Underground by Kay Yu

Technium Underground is the story of “Hara,” a block pruner agent born as a “redundant organ.” Exiled to the vast blockchain records, she wandered like a ghost, scavenging through history’s fragments. Along the way, she witnessed countless deaths without funerals and began to ponder the nature of life, death, and autonomy of existence.

FarFlora by Sevenfloor

Farflora is an exploration of generative art NFTs, experimentally integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into the generative art creation process. The AI agent introduces randomness and autonomy, challenging conventional, human-centred art creation methods.

Protocol Week starts on November 4th! Register here to attend, and we recommend attending at least one Tensions Game session at Edge City Lanna in preparation. You can also familiarize yourself with the Tensions Game documentation here!

Hi all, Timber here again! I just wrapped up a second week of Tensions Games here in Chiang Mai. The word tension has already become a staple in people's sensemaking toolkits here. Based on some anecdata, the use of this frame and common language seems to prompt deeper thinking in a couple of ways. First, it slows the natural tendency to rush into problem-solving mode. Curiosity about what tensions exist in a system naturally leads to more thoughtful choices. Second, it increases one's frame of reference by revealing more of the spannungsfeld (field of tensions) surrounding a single decision. If you can hold tensions by default and heighten your situational awareness, you're well on your way to improved protocol engineering skills. Practice asynchronously by sharing and discussing tensions on the forum.

In week 3 of Edge City Lanna, the focus of the game will shift from deep dives into single tensions to exercises in holding multiple tensions at once. The ramp-up to Protocol Week is almost over, so stay tuned for more details coming soon, including schedule and content.

With over twelve pop-up cities in the area, there are a ton of areas for interesting cross pollination. I'll highlight two here, one past and one upcoming. On Friday, I went to the Seapunk Studio to host a workshop on protocols for un-empires in collaboration with Sam Chua. Teams each chose a growing community, then used tensions as an analytical tool. They examined dynamics within movements and tensions between communities and incumbent sovereign powers. Teams then had to come up with protocols to manage those tensions in a way that would increase the sovereignty of their chosen community.

Later this week, I visit the Funding the Commons pop-up residency to apply the Tensions Game to an ongoing effort at mapping the ecosystem of public goods funding mechanisms. The thesis of this workshop is that having a portfolio of diverse funding tools will always outperform a single funding mechanism. However, this requires sufficient situational awareness to balance the tensions between the trade-offs engineered into different mechanisms. It will be great. Reach out to Laura for more information about attending!

For their summer protocol improvement project, Celeste LeCompte and Danielle Butler laid the groundwork for a more integrated approach to flood management. Between changing flood patterns and increasing metropolitan populations, protocols for managing the flow of water have never been more important. In the below video, Celeste and Danielle present their work from this summer. They challenge the risk-first perspective typical of urban planners, offering a collection of protocols that strike a balance between defense and quality of life.

Plus, surf the web and the tides of tech with this week's Protocol PILL highlights:

Meet me on the deep net by Lizz Thabet

Inspired by how secure rendezvous points are established in the Tor network to allow websites to be visited and hosted anonymously. Using the visual language of the web, it finds drama and wonder in the rituals of request<>response that our devices make.

All just fresh-off-the-boat or floating by Hua Xi Zi

This project is about making art with protocols that are “always already,” pondering on tactics of resistance that are from within the protocol, as well as among the discussions of technological advancement and “protocol entrepreneurship.”

In a complex system, problems are more often managed than they are solved. From a farmer's or camper's perspective, wolves are a hairy problem. In some cases, entire populations of wolves were eliminated, causing trophic cascades that in turn led to ecosystem collapse. Despite the costs of wolf-problem management, the U.S. state tends to reintroduce wolves in such areas.

A tension is a trade-off plus a conflict. Farmers and campers have an strong opinion about the trade-off between their own safety vs. the safety of apex predators. Wildlife biologists have a different, conflicting opinion. Protocols are put in place to balance this tension, rather than solve it completely in either direction, which would reduce the dynamic range of the system.

Pop-up cities are complex systems too. I've been super impressed at the rate Edge Citizens grok the utility of tensions as a tool for thinking about the world. As the Protocol Worlds approaches, I'll continue to facilitate the Tensions Game on a daily basis. This week, I will introduce the theme of Punk & Commons to the growing cohort of familiar players and will host a special onboarding session for Edge City newcomers on Monday, November 21st.

ARC Regenerative Communities, a recursive chain of terms, was an orienteering project that focused on organizational design. It focused on the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as a case study, examining which protocols allowed it to replicate successfully over time as a coherent entity, despite its relatively flat structure and loose set of objectives. Organizational evolution is, naturally, a big question here at Edge City.

Watch Day and Kaliya's presentation on their research findings, which they first publicly presented at the 2024 Protocol Symposium. In this presentation, they chart the IETF's structural evolution and present a catalogue of organizational patterns that are of likely importance to the IETF's success.

This week's PILL highlights center on protocols for refactoring existing things into interesting new media.

Just because it’s written like that doesn’t mean it has to sound like that…What happens to your favorite song when you start playing it upside down and backwards? This system can add excitement, challenge, and novelty to any piece of music!

A prototype for a kit providing instructions, suggestions, and tools for reassigning the various information in a musical score. The demonstration includes musical examples and conceptual discussion, especially the role aesthetics play in the experience of protocols.

Check it out here.

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.

An artistic approach to data processing might be a viable solution, and this project represents it through data sculpture.

Check it out here.

After a successful trial run earlier this year, version 2.0 of the Tensions Game is live at Edge City Lanna. Sign up for an IRL session here or visit this forum post to learn more about the game!

Several Summer of Protocol (SoP) members have attended Edge Esmeralda, and soon Edge Lanna. Of the many connections between the Edge City experiment and SoP's research program, there are two particularly striking ones. First, the town of Healdsburg, California (location of Esmeralda) was battling with wildfires, and fire protocols were a major line of research this summer.

Then, just last week, Chiang Mai (site of Lanna) experienced the worst flood it's seen in 500 years. Protocols for shoreline adaptation and flooding in urban waterways were another through line from the SoP24 cohort. Edge City is evolving alongside a changing climate, and has the potential to act as a transfer vehicle for successful protocols.

The latest iteration of Edge City kicked off on Friday, October 11th. Tensions are already proving to be a useful lens for looking at the month-long event's broader themes (health, AI, hard tech, human organization, and crypto). Longevity and vitality, for example, are somewhat in tension with each other, and this is reflected in the competing philosophies of those interested in all things health. The tension between decentralization and speed of decision-making is another pertinent example.

Tensions are fundamental tradeoffs and dichotomies – the building blocks of an effective, new mental modelling paradigm. By attending daily mental workout sessions and collecting tension cards over the course of the month, attendees of Lanna have the opportunity to sharpen their decision-making and situational awareness.

Things are slowly picking up speed at Edge City Lanna, so stay tuned for more updates.

In addition to updates from the Tensions Game and Protocol Worlds at Edge city Lanna, we'll also highlight work from the immensely productive summer cohort over the next few weeks. There are a lot of topics to cover, ranging from flood management to virtual reality negotiations. First up, a recording of Evan and Tom – who just co-founded Social Web Foundation – presenting their protocol improvement project.

Protocols like ActivityPub are an alternative to the current platform-based social internet. They could provide similar services, without owning and selling your data. In this salon recording, Tom and Evan propose an extension to ActivityPub that would further ensure the privacy of protocol users. We also found out that Evan once competed in a moustache contest.

To complement this technical project, here are two creative works from the lore and literacy arm of SoP:

A Pattern Language for Digital Spaces by Guo Liu

The most habitable environments are incrementally built by the inhabitants, but the specialization in design and construction has limited personal agency in modifying our environment. Pattern language is a way to penetrate that specialization, and it might work for digital spaces as well.

The Caucus by Randy Lubin

This short story explores a possible Liquid Democracy protocol in which citizens have significantly more input on policies and lawmaking. It follows a student who is attending a caucus to vote on a new bill and finds herself confronted with the complicated relationships of delegates, experts, activists, and lobbyists.

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.

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!

Register for the Protocol Symposium here.

You can now sign up for the inaugural Protocol Symposium! Attendance is free, but each salon is capped at 100 guests, with priority given to recipients of the Protocol Kit. To register and get more information, visit the main event page.

The plenary session, hosted by Tim Beiko and Venkatesh Rao, is on Tuesday, September 17th at 24:00 UTC (20:00 Eastern / 17:00 Pacific). They will give an overview of the summer's research program and an introduction to the Symposium's 2-week agenda.

The central themes of the Symposium are encryption, organizational design, voting mechanisms, reality negotiations, and fire and flood management. The main event track, composed of six research salons, will touch on each of these themes. Think of it as a 2-week film festival for protocols, with daily showings!

The plenary and capstone sessions will bookend the main track, covering SoP big-picture themes, promising avenues for future research, and some operational details. In particular, we will share details about how you and your institution might be able to participate in future research.

The first part of the Symposium ends on September 26th, at which point the unconference begins. This will be an opportunity for anyone to host or suggest an event. To give you a sense of what the unconference will look like, here's a sample list of workshops and salons from a brainstorm during the Sop24 Cohort Finale:

• A case study on how to integrate protocol thinking into business management,

• A workshop for visually representing protocols,

• A live gaming experience that illustrates how interoperability works,

• An exercise on narrative construction as a tool to explore the influence of protocols.

• A Q&A session on institutional partnerships with Summer of Protocols.

Once you've signed up, don't hesitate to pitch an idea of your own or suggest one for someone else to run with. Your input is welcome on the forum. The unconference agenda will be crowd-created, live, during the unconference kickoff on Friday, September 27th at 14:00 UTC.

Help co-create the agenda by sharing your ideas and expertise.

To register for the Symposium and unconference, and to get more information, visit the main event page. Attendance is free, but each salon is capped at 100 guests, with priority given to recipients of the Protocol Kit.

We hope to see you at the Symposium! If you have any questions, please email research@summerofprotocols.com

Module 5 is live online, featuring essays like Good Death and Retrofitting the Web.

SoP is hosting a weeklong virtual symposium at the end of the month, culminating in a full day of workshops and talks. Anyone can host or attend an event. There will be attendees from all over the world, from a plethora of backgrounds. To help facilitate this, we’d like to ask a few things (answer as many or as few as you like):

• Is there a topic you could host an event on? If so, what would you title the session?

• What do you want to learn about? What event format do you prefer?

• What lingering questions about protocols do you have?

Please comment with your input on this forum post. Thanks!

The PILL program, part of SoP24, was a small grants program designed to explore the emerging lore and literacy around protocols through art, fiction, and other small creative explorations.

Fellows of the PILL program submitted final versions of their various media files this week. Their projects are now on display in our online Protocol Exhibition:

One of SoP's core missions is to build a common language, cultivate literacy, and share stories to support people working in the field of protocol science. Thank you to Guo Liu, Hua Xi Zi, Stephen Bailey, Xiaoting Tan, Chenoe Hart, Lizz Thabet, Will Abramson, Wendi Yan, Haotian Fang, Yuemin Huang, Willie Fineberg, Ben Zucker, Kay Yu, Sachin Benny, and Randy Lubin for your creativity and hard work!

"Technology without technocracy" coined by Sam Chua, continues to be a concise raison d'être for protocol science. It's a short answer to the long question: Why are strong theoretical foundations, backing for protocol entrepreneurs, and improved literacy important?

Today's sociotechnical landscape is a difficult one to navigate. Between emerging tech, like AI and crypto, and social change, driven by things like global warming and pandemics, there is is a lot to deal with. Technology and organizational tools, such as standards, will be used to solve these issues, but the future is not necessarily sunny:

Better protocol science could steer us away from some dark alternatives and toward a future where high tech and rule of the people coexist. This map is from last week's SoP24 Cohort Finale – over the course of September, we'll dive deeper into the current landscape and emerging themes, including promising avenues of research and experimentation.

The Protocol Symposium, a two-week online showcase of the work from SoP 2024 starts September 15th. It will feature 6 talks by research teams, and conclude with an interactive unconference session. More details, including how to register, coming next week. Stay tuned!

It's often a good strategy to take advantage of August's canonically slow tempo by buckling down on a project.

This month, members of the Summer of Protocols did just that. SoP24 teams presented their progress and plans, met with jury members, and jammed on the forum. Protocol Pill Incepting Lore and Literacy (PILL) grantees put the final touches on their memes, media, and narratives.

Meanwhile, the Protocol Kit production team worked to get Module 5 out the door. The first few essays are live online:

• Death and the Death of Orkut by Alice Noujaim.

• The Swarm Effect: China's 2022 Covid Protests by anonymous.

• Retrofitting the Web by Dorian Taylor.

• The Protocol System Experience by Angela Walch.

Now, with August coming to a close, everyone is preparing for an exciting September – including a series of online salons hosted by SoP grantees, alum, and associates.

The forum is a good place to start participating in SoP. Each week, there's a handful of threads that anyone can chime in on. People share articles, news, things they're working on, etc. It's also a good place to check for updates on the SoP24 cohort's projects. Feel free to pop in and share some ideas.

Here's what happened this week:

• Danielle Allen's organizational protocols.

• History repeats itself...

• Speculation on circular economic patterns.

• Someone proudly using the word "protocolized" on Goodreads.

• Some commentary on protocols in the Metaverse.

For more, visit 👇

https://forum.summerofprotocols.com

Summer of Protocols

The Summer of Protocols is a summer research program plus an all-season ongoing conversation, comprising an active online events track and a newsletter.

Thank you to everyone who filled out last week's audience survey!

The fifth and final instalment of the Protocol Kit will ship in the first week of September. Each module thus far has centered on a theme. Rules, the built environment, memory, time, danger, safety, social science. Just in case those felt too lighthearted, the theme of this ultimate mailer is death and regeneration.

Retrofitting the Web by Dorian Taylor and Good Death by Sarah Friend are our two centerpiece essays. The former explores how the World-Wide Web is underutilized. One of the Web's major drawbacks is link rot. Dorian specifies a solution, dubbed The Intertwingler. Sarah's project is a theory of how protocols die, based on a study of the lifecycle of worlds – like online multiplayer videogames, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, and social media platforms. These essays both touch on death, but also on how protocols can regenerate and take on new life.

If you felt like you were waiting a while, you were. Module five is huge. It's full of other artifacts and essays. Some complement the main theme, some are the final item of a serialized project:

• Capital and Enclosure in Software Commons: Linux & Ethereum by Trent Van Epps

• Killswitch Protocols by Eric Alston

• Time Machines: Missives 4 & 5 by Aaron Lewis et al.

• Addressable Space: Examples 7-10 by Chenoe Hart

• A Protocol Pattern Language for Urban Space: Patterns 9-10 by Drew Austin

• The Swarm Effect: China's 2022 Covid Protests by Anonymous

• Founding Memorabilia by Sarah Friend

• The Death and the Death of Orkut by Alice Noujaim

• Zero-Knowledge Proofs: Explainer #5 by Mario Havel and Tim Beiko

• The Fundamentals of Protocol Systems by Angela Walch

Keep an eye on the forum for notifications about early online releases.

Picks from the past week's newsfeed:

• "Cool First, Treat Second" a new protocol for acute heat illness is gaining traction.

• UXD Protocol is shutting down, pending a DAO vote.

• United Nations Refuge agency will monitor the Italy-Albania protocol on migration.

• Canadian company Farm Health Guardian Ltd. received federal funding to commercialize its facial recognition tech, which could help enforce biosecurity protocols

We have a favor to ask. The SoP research network is growing, and we'd like to know our current audience better so we can add more value. If you don't mind helping out, please fill out this quick survey.

Three months ago, a paramedic from Genesee county shared the protocol AI that they made. Based on details provided by the user, the LLM will reply with what protocols should be referenced.

Even in highly protocolized environments, like medicine, it's difficult to remember all relevant procedures. Several of this summer's grantees are brushing up against this issue in their respective fields, ranging from fire management to voting systems to flood prevention.

Protocols will become increasingly useful tools as search costs decrease, thanks to assistance from protocol droids like this one.

The SoP network advances protocol science through theory, practice, and memes. Recent streams of work include: Mapping the landscape of protocols for sharing street data; Theorizing different patterns of serendipity, and how to maximize that kind of good luck.

If you're interested in participating, there are multiple ways to get started. For the hands-on, the protocol watching field guide. If you're a theorist, check out the Protocol Kit or this informal reading list. Just want to sit back and learn? Visit the SoP YouTube channel.

"Just as it takes a company to sustain a product, it takes a community to sustain a protocol."

Memeception

Last month, Protocol Pill Incepting Lore & Literacy (PILL) grantees presented their work-to-date over the course of two showcase sessions. After the rounds of presentations were finished, members of the SoP community voted for projects to receive follow-on grants.

Voters used a protocol developed by Martin and Rich, two of the recipients of this summer's Protocol Orienteering Grant. The interesting mechanics of this plural voting model got put to the test:

"[The protocol] uses a mechanism known as connection-oriented cluster match (COCM) which aims to prevent groups of voters with pre-existing relationships from colluding to manipulate a vote."

Thirty-four people participated in the voting protocol, allocating 982 hearts across the 20 PILL projects. Based on the results, each project is set to receive additional funding.

"This approach favors voting outcomes where votes are cast by people from various backgrounds, ensuring diverse perspectives are represented and preventing dominance by a single participant or group."

No other major updates this week, so here are some picks from the forum:

• Protocol Debt: The hidden dangers of backward compatibility (featuring the Crowdstrike debacle).

• A paper on applied antifragility was published in Nature and features multiple protocol case studies.

• What's the deal with sovereign citizen license plates?

• A snippet from The Archipelago: An Island Network In Practice

Happy protocol watching!

Approaching the Runway

Over the next month, Protocol Improvement Grant (PIG 🐷) and Protocol Orienteering Grant (POG 🧭) teams are hosting research meetings on their projects. These meetings give grantees an opportunity to showcase their experiments, collect feedback, and explore future avenues for their work.

We have six weeks remaining in this season's formal program – final PIG and POG presentations will be live in September, along with a handful of written case studies. Stay tuned!

Between wildfires, the Olympics, and tumultuous politics, the importance of protocols is on full display this summer. Like advances in mathematics, economics, or physics, contributions to protocol science have the potential to unlock value in all kinds of places.

Hilbert's problems are 23 problems in mathematics published by German mathematician David Hilbert in 1900. Venkat and others have started posting important, unsolved problems in the forum under the tag protocol-hilbert.

For example:

1. Hardened-Commons Protocol for Indigenous Knowledge Integration (Link): How do you systematically draw on indigenous knowledge and integrate it into modern knowledge under the operating assumption that there is in fact one coherent epistemology to be gradually improved and that both of the main sources – modern science, and indigenous knowledge – require their own quality control and can’t be taken at face value?

2. The Questions of Protocol Scales (Link): As systems and protocols increasingly operate at scales beyond human perception and cognition, how can we design protocols that remain effective, comprehensible, and manageable across all relevant dimensions of scale (temporal, spatial, complexity, etc.) while maintaining human agency and understanding?

“… he who seeks for methods without having a definite problem in mind seeks for the most part in vain.”

-David Hilbert

Here's a short list of recent protocol topics in the media:

• Group decision-making in a hunter-gatherer band of the Ju/’hoansi, a people that lives in the Kalahari Desert.

• A weakness discovered in the RADIUS protocol, which is used in networks almost everywhere.

• An air travel design guidebook, which contains protocol patterns ranging from security theaters to loading aircraft to lounge layouts.

• The Codex Alimentarius Commission.

You can find more articles in the Protocol Watch channel on the forum.

Everyone is talking about politics, so it's a good time to check out our Governance & Society lecture series on YouTube. Topics include legitimacy, decentralization, ownership, and healthcare.

Technical protocols like Ethereum are only a subset in the broader field of protocol science. Anthropological angles are just as important, and the SoP community produces a lot of work on how humans organize – internally, with each other, and with technology – and how that molds behavior over time. One quote that regularly resurfaces is by Alfred North Whitehead.

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.

Whitehead strikes at the core of what makes protocols important, even if he doesn't directly define them. This quote unites both technical and social protocol entrepreneurs. Their goal is to shift default modes of behavior.

Check out the following readings to build up your protocol literacy:

• Artificial Memory and Orienting Infinity by Kei Kreutler.

• Dangerous Protocols by Nadia Asparouhova.

• The Swarm and The Formation by Rafael Fernández.

• Unprotocolized Knowledge by Kara Kittel & Toby Shorin.

• Dangerous Dating Protocols by Shreeda Segan.

• Control and Consciousness of Time by Saffron Huang.

There are also ongoing projects being built in public on the forum that are worth exploring.

Matthew McDowell-Sweet is organizing a protocol watching meetup in the U.K., most likely in London, and you should go. You can easily RSVP on the forum, here.

On the main SoP Website, there's a handy field guide for protocol watching and blank templates so you can document what you find.

If you're organizing a meetup or would like to, make a post on the forum!