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:
Protocols are Eating the World
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.
Spring '24
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.
Summer '24
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.
Fall '24
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. ☀