Part of the 2025 Protocol Symposium

Protocols exist all around us. They facilitate both the extraordinary and the mundane, everything from hard sciences to fuzzy social phenomena, and while individually observable, mostly exist outside formal taxonomies or unifying mental models. Over the past three years, Summer of Protocols has funded research, experiments, arts and fiction to explore protocols from multiple angles. Now, we think it’s time to start developing some rigorous foundations for our this emerging field. If you love discovering and codifying the latent structure and hard edges in a seemingly messy and chaotic subject, this workshop is for you.

Register (Deadline Aug 22)

Over two days September 12-14 (Fri-Sat) the Summer of Protocols will convene the first ever Protocol Foundations Workshop (online), with the goal of conducting an exploratory survey of this hitherto uncharted territory, and begin the task of building formal foundations underneath the emerging broader discipline of Protocol Studies.

Across four 90-minute zoom calls, we will orient, sense-make, synthesize, and roadmap and aim to arrive at a very rough first draft of a whitepaper to be developed further through Fall. In between the live sessions, we will have 3 asynchronous work blocks where we can continue chatting on Discord as we work.

If you’re interested in foundational questions, unified theories that cut across many phenomena, and a search for deep laws and conservation principles, we invite you to join us.  Please register by Aug 22. The workshop is free, but capacity is limited.

Register (Deadline Aug 22)

We’ll think thorough both abstract and grounded topics such as:

  1. Phenomenology across a diverse array of specific simple examples
  2. Notation schemes and formal languages for describing and talking about protocols
  3. Creating scaffolding for empirical grounding, such as systematizing the observability of protocols
  4. Relating logic and foundations concerns to quantitative methods and data-driven thinking
  5. Looking at existing formalisms from specific domains, such as process calculi
  6. Looking at protocols through “pattern languages” and other ontological lenses
  7. Identifying “challenge problems” relevant across many domains, drawing inspiration from Hilbert’s problems
  8. Inventorying domain-specific problems from multiple protocol domains for special attention, such as climate treaty compliance, blockchain ossification, and management of forest fires

These are all protocol foundations topics. Questions to be framed and tackled not just with qualitative arguments and accounts, or through analogies across domains, but by identifying deep postulates that apply across a wide range of protocol phenomenology, and developing formal methods, general theories, conservation principles, and tradeoff models that apply to protocols in many domains.

We will aim to produce a shared research roadmap, cataloguing the most potent ideas that can inform individual research agendas and projects, as well as fuel future collaborative activities through Summer of Protocols and participants’ home institutions. If you’re interested in foundational questions, unified theories that cut across many phenomena, and a search for deep laws and conservation principles, we invite you to join us.

Agenda

The workshop will be structured as four 90 minute Zoom sessions with asynchronous working sessions in between where we will continue chatting on the Discord as we work.

  • Fri Sep 12, 0800-0930 PT (1500-1630 UTC) : Orientation
    • Introduction and warmup exercises (30 min)
    • Brainstorm of prototypical problems and attacks (30 min)
    • Birds of a Feather discussions (30 min)
  • Asynchronous Work Block 1 (2.5h)
    • Participants explore background material on their own
    • Lightning talk volunteers develop their talks.
  • Fri Sep 12 1300-1430 PT (2000-2130 UTC): Sense-making
    • 6x informal improv lightning talks of 7 minutes (60 min)
    • Brainstorm of white paper structure and outline (30 min)
  • Asynchronous Work Block 2 (10.5h)
    • Participants dump initial notes and ideas into appropriate sections of white paper draft
  • Sat Sep 13, 0800-0930 PT (1500-1630 UTC): Synthesis
    • Review and critical discussion of white paper
  • Asynchronous Work Block 3 (2.5h)
    • Participants clean up and structure the ideas in the white paper draft
  • Sat Sept 13, 1300-1430 PT (2000-2130 UTC): Roadmapping
    • Open discussions
    • Planning for white paper project

Resources

If you’re new to protocols, we recommend the following resources to get up to speed

  • Protocol Reader, a compendium of completed research from the Summer of Protocols program (ebook, open-access).
  • YouTube Channel, with a variety of both technical and non-technical talks on various aspects of protocols
  • The SIGFPT (Special Interest Group in Formal Protocol Theory) channel on our Discord

Register (Deadline: Aug 22)

If you have any questions, please email research@summerofprotocols.com

This workshop is part of the Protocol Symposium, which features additional activities of potential interest to applicants.