Best of summerofprotocols.com on Kiwi News
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10 stories from summerofprotocols.com have been shared on Kiwi News since 17 December 2023, with 34 upvotes and 5 comments in total. The latest was shared on 16 February 2025. They are listed below, most upvoted first.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Protocol Reader
In fall 2022, after the change of ownership at Twitter, a significant minority of users, perhaps several million, looked for an alternative technology paradigm rather than another product or platform. The article says they found a class of Twitter alternatives that describe themselves as protocols. Most other departing users, it says, moved to products such as Meta's Threads, Substack or LinkedIn, or retreated to private online spaces.
- Protocol Kit
The Protocol Kit is a 3-ring binder of over 400 pages, mailed in six modules of about 80 pages over eight months, designed to support study, research, policy-making, scene-making and entrepreneurship around protocols. It includes printed research from the inaugural Summer of Protocols program plus supplementary materials and tools, and leaves room for users to add their own notes. Only 512 kits are available free to selected individuals and organizations, who are asked to explain their interest in a request form. The material will also be freely available on the website for anyone to print and assemble their own binder.
- Retrofitting the Web
Dorian Taylor argues that the World Wide Web is a mediocre form of hypermedia because its links are brittle, one-way and untyped. He says this produces big, clumsy documents with few links, no backlinks, ambiguous data semantics and poor content reuse, which means readers must read more per unit of information, authors maintain separate documents for different audiences, developers keep reinventing basic functionality, and information goes stale and misleads people. Taylor writes that dense hypermedia would require a protocol for keeping the addresses (URLs) of very small objects stable and continuous.
- Summer of Protocols 2024: Call for Applications
Summer of Protocols has announced its 2024 program, which focuses on downstream applications, experimentation and field testing of existing protocols rather than clean-sheet design. The program has three tracks: Protocol Improvement Grants, offering $90,000 each to 5 two-person teams to prototype and field-test improvements to a real-world protocol; the Protocol PILL Challenge, offering small grants of $1,000 each to creative works that make protocols accessible to lay audiences; and a Partner Program with institutions such as the Centre for Strategic Futures in Singapore and Edge City. The application deadline for the PIG and PILL grants is April 12, 2024, and the program begins May 8.
- Protocol Improvement Grants (PIGs)
Summer of Protocols 2024 announces three tracks, with the Protocol Improvement Grants (PIGs) awarding $90,000 each to 5 two-person teams to prototype and field-test improvements to a real-world protocol. The program focuses on improving existing protocols rather than clean-sheet design, based on findings from the 2023 program. The Protocol PILL Challenge offers 20 development grants of $1000 each for protocol-themed creative works, and the Partner Program works with institutions such as the Centre for Strategic Futures in Singapore, Edge City, and the Global Chinese Community. The PIG and PILL application deadline is April 12, 2024, and the program begins May 8.
- Novel: Composable Life: Our Island and Us
- Re-Move
Nahee Kim's visual narrative "Re-Move" uses a spiral building resembling a stack of circular hard disks to explore how computers locate and retrieve stored data. In the story, a character searches for fuzzy memories by matching room-like address codes, and each room triggers sounds and feelings tied to those memories. For another character, the same process is a kind of sorting and removal, akin to tidying up. The article says the title illustrates the end of a synthetic being's existence, connecting protocols of memory, death, and space.
- Protocol Week
Summer of Protocols and 0xPARC, collectively S0xP, are organizing Protocol Worlds, a week-long practical inquiry during Edge Esmeralda into the intersection of paradigm-shifting futures. Participants will co-create worlds emerging from the convergence of protocolized constraints, with researchers and practitioners from fields ranging from architecture to cryptography presenting the main tensions in their domains. The program starts with a half-day workshop on Sunday, June 23, runs daily world-building workshops from June 24 to June 26, and ends on Friday, June 27, when participants share their work.
- Standards Make the World
David Lang argues that technical standards are the quiet rules that give shape and direction to civilization, forming a third critical function alongside private organizations and public institutions. He states that well-designed standards can become enabling technologies, such as the Internet or shipping containers. Lang describes his book Standards Make the World as a mix of history of the past two centuries of standards-making, personal narrative based on the Bristlemouth connector standard, and guidebook for creating disruptive new standards.
- Protocols Don’t Build Pyramids
Drew Austin argues that protocols mediate between the fast-changing "software" of cities and their rigid physical "hardware," and that apparent protocol failure may sometimes be a protocol working as intended. The essay says protocol failure is especially visible in the built environment's inability to accommodate change over time. It also states that an accompanying "pattern language," modeled on Christopher Alexander's work, presents protocol design as a way to improve and maintain the built environment.