The next Town Hall is on April 17th at 1:00PM Eastern Time. Josh Stark will be talking about his essay Atoms, Institutes, Blockchains. Access the prereading and livestream here.
Reviews are underway
The response to this year's Call For Applications was overwhelming. Thank you to everyone who applied and participated in the RFC Process!
The final count: 137 PIGs and 91 PILLs.
It should take us a week or so of reviews and processing to make the award decisions, but it is already clear we have more high quality applications than spots, so we certainly have our work cut out for us in composing the cohort. Stay tuned for updates!
Protocols for organizations
Management theory is a promising frontier for protocol science.
Kyle Mathews recently published some of his thinking on this topic:
“My preferred theory atm is it’s a combination of scaling problems — institutional practices invented in the previous decades and centuries are not scaling well as the world grows larger and more complex. And then the mother of all disruptions, the internet , which changed how humanity senses the world — which disrupts many of the underlying mechanisms supporting institutions.”
Mike Baxter did as well, on Goal Atlas:
“A protocol is a simple description of how, in principle, to approach a particular challenge in a way that will produce good enough outcomes, most of the time.”
Interested in this subject? Jump into the forum discussion!
Protocol watch
This isn't a widespread hobby yet, but protocol watching is growing in popularity. Some of the finds from the past week:
An advert encouraging the adoption of the ZIP code standard, starring Mr. Zip.
Table saw safety protocols which was a discourse that also made the rounds on Twitter.
How protocols can go undetected, as lambda protocols, due to subtlety or double meanings.
Recordings + Materials
You can catch up on the Lisa Neigut (niftynei) talk from last week here. That forum post also has the slides to her talk!
And if you haven't already, be sure to check out the already-released components of Module 3, including the very useful Kafka Index:
