2025 Protocol Symposium
Applications are now open for the second annual Protocol Symposium, where we aim to bring together the activities of the Summer of Protocols program year in a week-long capstone event. In 2025, the third year of this program, we’ve been pursuing three major threads: education, scene-building, and focused research tracks. The overarching theme of the symposium will be the same as that of the program year: Accelerating Order.
The Symposium comprises two components, beginning with an in-person weekend research workshop and followed by a week-long online school. You can apply for one or both. Applications are due August 15th, 2025. We encourage applying early since space for both components is limited.
- Foundations Workshop (in-person, September 12-14, 2025, Fri-Sun): Up to 30 participants will convene in Vancouver, Canada to work towards a formal, mathematizable theory of protocols.
- Protocol School (online, September 15-19, 2025, Mon-Fri): This will comprise twelve 90-minute learning modules as well as focused coworking/hackathon sessions. The modules will be taught by 2025 cohort teaching fellows.
The Protocol School will be college-level, and suitable for university students, researchers, and working professionals from any background. Some background in technology will be helpful but not necessary. A certification will be available for participants of the Protocol School component who meet the requirements (see below).
Protocol School Certificate
Participants in the Protocol School who complete the following requirements will be eligible to earn a Protocol Studies Certificate:
- Attend at least 8 of the 12 school sessions, and participate according to the instructor’s expectations (which may include in-session exercises).
- Prototype, plan, or design a protocol-themed project through the co-working sessions, such as a technical contribution, scholarly study, or an artistic project, which you will be expected to briefly present at the final session as a lightning talk.
- Read the Protocol Reader, and post a brief review in our Discord community by the end of the Symposium week.
While you can attend the Protocol School without aiming to earn the certificate, we highly encourage you to aim to earn it. Our goal in designing this certification component is not to create yet another meaningless credential, but to create an informal but serious marker of basic foundational literacy and knowledge, as well as set interested participants up for taking on more ambitious protocol-themed projects beyond the symposium week.
For those who earn the certificate, we will aim to create suitable scaffolding for follow-on support through the program, such as appropriate Discord channels, suitable Special Interest Group (SIG) call tracks, mentoring, and coaching support for future grant and funding opportunities both within the SoP program and beyond. Earning the certification should prove useful to those aiming to make serious contributions to the study of protocols, take on protocol entrepreneurship projects, or pursue writing and art projects.
About the Foundations Workshop
When: September 12-14
Where: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Who: Up to 30 academics, students, professionals, and independent scholars
Format: Discussion sessions, working blocks, lightning chalk talks
Application Deadline: August 15
The goal of this weekend is to begin developing a formal theory of protocols. Do they have an inherent structure or pattern that could be expressed with math or logic? Could we model a simple handshake and a complicated climate accord with the same notation? We invite academics, especially from STEM disciplines, to apply.
Workshop Schedule
September 12: Participants arrive throughout the morning. Some tailored sessions in the afternoon based on the subset of researchers who will be present. Group dinner.
September 13: Kickoff talk, followed by semi-structured discussions, quick whiteboard talks, and quiet working blocks. Group dinner.
September 14: Informal talks by participants of their candidate theories, models, and formalizations, discussions of next steps. Participants depart throughout the afternoon.
We will be able to support or subsidize travel for a limited number of participants (please indicate support needs in the appropriate part of the application form).
About the Protocol School
When: September 15-19
Where: Online
Who: 50 participants from any background
Format: Twelve, ninety-minute modules
Application Deadline: August 31
Modules are in development by the SoP25 teaching fellows and program leads. Anyone who registers for the course should leave with a high degree of protocol literacy, a sense for how to apply key concepts to their own field of study or practice, and some great contacts with protocolists from all around the globe.
School Schedule
All times in U.S. Eastern Time. Add to your calendar.
Monday, September 15 | Engineering
11am – Introductory Seminar; 4pm – Protocolized Modeling and Verification of Cyber-Physical Systems; 9pm – Beyond Consensus: Protocols as Digital Institutions
Tuesday, September 16 | Art
11am – Protocols of Storytelling: How to Craft Meaningful Stories in an Age of Generative AI; 4pm – Protocol Art; 9pm – Musicalization not Music: Experimenting with Systems through Art
Wednesday, September 17 | Organization
11am – Designing Trust: Protocols, Society, and Web 3.0; 4pm – TBD; 9pm – Strategy as an Organizational Coordination Protocol for the Public Sector
Thursday, September 18 | Humanities
11am – Protocol Design as Governance; 4pm – Designing Digital Worlds: Communities, Protocols, AI, and Power; 9pm – Towards a New Social Science of Protocols
Friday, September 19 | Application
11am – Applied Protocol Theory; 4pm – Graduation