Harrison_Tang: Yeah a quick uh a quick note uh so next week is the internet identity Workshop so that we will not have a ccg meeting uh next Tuesday because a lot of people won't be able to join so uh so yeah uh I will send out uh reminder about that as well so we will not have a meeting uh next Tuesday. ✪
Venkatesh_Rao: All right uh thanks everybody for having us on it's a pleasure to be here and in some ways this is almost the ideal forum for us to be talking about what we've been doing since um this is kind of an. ✪
Venkatesh_Rao: A topic that flies under the radar and that's kind of almost what makes it interesting protocols and standards so some background the summer protocols is um summer research program funded by the ethereum foundation and the goal is to give grants to people working on protocols in the broadest sense so on the loser wide scope aspects of protocols that um normally don't get as much attention as the detail technical aspects of any particular protocol so by the broadest sense we mean everything from what is the culture of handshakes in um given culture um how does governance and ethereum work how what does the Royal protocol and an imperial medieval court so any usage of the word protocol is in scope for us so the pilot here was last year and we are now in the second year and we are actually in the application Phase for the second Year's grant program. ✪
Venkatesh_Rao: Close this Friday so have any of you are interested please check out summer protocols cam the uh call for applications is there and you can also go to if you're interested in just um being a bit of a spectator there's a forum summer of protocols cam where people post their rfc's request for comments um for their applications and proposals this year so you can see there's like 60 odd um rfc's there and we'll be able to only fund about uh 5 um significant projects so we have 2 grants a larger grant for 2 full-time researchers to do a bigger project and a small micro grant program so for the larger program we have like 60 applications for a 5 spots this year so we have an exciting time ahead to pick 5 okay so that's the background. ✪
Venkatesh_Rao: Started was uh almost a year and a half ago Tim Baker who's part of the EF reached out to me uh to basically discuss broader philosophical um and managerial issues around ethereum and um he and I and a few other people from the EF including Josh Stark started um basically discussing these broad-based issues and we wrote a pilot study called the unreasonable sufficiency of protocols which you can find on the site uh but while doing that work we realized that the topic is far broader than um our conversations could hope to cover and we realized it would be a really good idea to start a program just focused on these broad aspects uh trying to like step back and look beyond the immediate technical issues not just of ethereum but of protocols in general so deliberate intent from the get-go was to focus on General problems and issues that were specifically instantiated in the ethereum world so for example the ossific of the blockchain but in a broad scope way so. ✪
Venkatesh_Rao: The term that in the blockchain world is used to refer to um what happens to your blockchain as it matures in ages but this is a problem that you encounter in everything from like you know cities um to railway infrastructures to um I don't know even measurement standards or to talk about the stuff you guys talk about like um protocols and standards around how credentials are used in a society right so everything oif but there's a sense in which worldwide to study in broadly so that's kind of how it started last year we uh funded 12 significant what we call Core projects and about 20 what we called affiliate projects that built on the core projects you can see the research as we published it online and I would say the philosophical core of the program last year was to just establish the ground as. ✪
Venkatesh_Rao: That there's a there there that there is such a thing we could call protocol science or protocol studies and I think we convinced ourselves that there is such a thing uh we did what we called nerd sniper cells so we kind of like all got really um interested in the topic uh we protocol build ourselves another term we use um and sort of went down various bunny trails and it was all super interesting and I would say the lighthouse idea for our Explorations was a quote by um. ✪
Venkatesh_Rao: Which goes civilization advances by increasing the number of operations we can do without thinking about them so this idea became our Northstar and all the research projects kind of like Loosely orbited this idea of like what are these unconscious layer of civilizational infrastructure including you know familiar things like you know Screw gauge standards or um you know naming conventions uh all the way to um like soft things like handshakes like I mentioned to now climate protocols blockchain so all these things are kind of belong in these invisible layers that improve our lives but we don't think about them. ✪
Venkatesh_Rao: And uh last year's our overall outcome I would say was we convinced ourselves protocol science is a thing and that it should be a first class Citizen and how we think about the world and this year's Focus I would say is um move a little Downstream from that and start to establish a kind of like practice or discipline we think of as protocol entrepreneurship by which we mean take a domain that has like some uh protocols elements to it and think about either improving the protocols in them or perhaps dismantling the protocols maybe it should not be that protocol and maybe it should be more uh loose and um free flowing right so both protocol and deep protocol in an entrepreneurial sense are in scope and we want to ask what does it take to be a protocol entrepreneur how does it differ from being a regular entrepreneur or a startup founder in Silicon Valley how is it different from Simply being like you know um long-term bureaucrat in a government. ✪
<dorian> getting sound effects but no audio; signing off
Venkatesh_Rao: What are 1 of our researchers David Lang called a standards entrepreneur in his research his paper is also online but by standards entrepreneur he meant like you know almost a 19th century model of um if you think everybody should use a standards crew threading uh standard how do you go about like establishing that as a standard and he studied how that practice evolved over a century uh but Protocols are more complex more Dynamic things they involve code they involve States so Protocols are richer construct and presumably protocol entrepreneurship is a more challenging thing than standards on entrepreneurship so we want to see what it takes to establish um that um so I I'll. ✪
Venkatesh_Rao: Thought I want to plant in your mind is I I'm a big fan of the show Doctor Who and recently I noticed that recent seasons of Doctor Who use the word protocol a lot so this is the reboot since 2007 or so so I got curious and I went to a database and searched for the word protocol in the scripts. ✪
<will> Dorian, maybe try chrome or brave if you arent already
<harrison_tang> Chrome should work. Previously, Jitsi had issues with Safari (not sure if it has been fixed)
Venkatesh_Rao: That before um the uh 2007 reboot so Seasons up to around 1998 the word protocol was used a grand total of 2 times in All Seasons so between like 1950 whatever to uh 1998 just 2 uses of the word protocol but since the um new version started there have been 70 I think 70 or 72 users of the word so something is clearly going on and you see this pattern all over the word protocol is used over and over more often and I think what's happening is that ever since the internet um became a thing the world has gotten more protocols and we are becoming more aware of the fact we think of our environment as this artificial technological environment defined by protocols so it's kind of a exciting environment to be in and I think it's the right time to be studying protocol and the immediate impetus for us in fact was um you know when um the Twitter got bought by Elon Musk and everybody got excited about mastadon. ✪
Venkatesh_Rao: It is a thing called forecaster so it's kind of the right time and there was a lot of discourse around it a couple of years ago and that's when we got started but I've said enough so um I'll just quickly introduce the other people um on the call with me Josh Stark is with the EF and he's been studying a concept of hardness that he'll be talking about uh then we have Dorian um yeah we'll start with the shano shano heart is an architect and uh she studied protocols in urban space addressing then we'll um talk to Dorian Taylor who works on basically web Technologies and he's come up with a protocol for publishing web content and finally Spencer Chang um who studied kind of like software aspects of how we preserve memory and protocols for like preserving and developing your identity through memory habits so those are the 4 people we'll hear from very quickly so over to Josh Stark to kick us off then should you know then Dorian then span. ✪
Josh_Stark: Hey thanks mitesh and hello everybody um thank you for taking the time and inviting us here I think we're all excited to chat with you folks uh so as minger said uh I work at the EF um or I serve as part of the leadership team and I've been involved with Summer protocols going back to some uh early discussions with Tim and make attached and others uh and uh make estimated just do a very brief introduction to the EF and maybe how we relate to protocols and then talk a bit about uh this idea of hardness which is something I've been writing about which intersects nicely I think with some of the topics from some of our protocols so briefly um 3 important Concepts about the ethereum foundation first as you might imagine we are focused on ethereum uh on you know developing it bettering it for its future making it a useful set of Technologies for the human species um 2 things you might not expect that come out of that are that 1 we we think of that as a very a long-term Focus we're interested in uh ensuring. ✪
<kaliya_identity_woman> Do you have a link to that paper you mentioned on protocol entrprenureship?
Josh_Stark: Not just the 1 that exists today but the 1 that will exist in the future when they're maybe billions of people interacting with ethereum or the systems that uh integrate with it in some fashion. ✪
Josh_Stark: Uh and the other is that we you know really think a lot about I guess the kind of you know culture and values and philosophy side of things um it has been joked before that ethereum is really a philosophy project masturbating as a technical implementation uh and we know that the ideas here and the rationale for it is a big piece of that and so we try to pay attention to that as well. ✪
Josh_Stark: An idea about the EF is that we're not really 1 institution or 1 company um it is really a community of teams uh most teams at the EF are quite independent um they're just part of this larger umbrella of infrastructure uh that you know we maintain and if you're not too familiar with the ethereum ecosystem you should know that of course there are many many organizations companies teams outside of the EF itself uh who contribute to the protocol and play a large role in understanding it and developing it and improving it. ✪
Josh_Stark: The third idea that's important to understand about the EF is that uh we take really seriously and follow what we call a philosophy of subtraction and this is the idea that uh you know it is natural for institutions to want to accumulate power and to accumulate influence and Prestige and we know that we have to push back against that uh we very actively want to make space for others to step up and contribute to the protocol and to share the responsibilities of maintaining this this public good this open source project for others and so we try to have a quite light touch and we think very intentionally about uh where we can subtract ourselves uh so that others can add to the ecosystem in our place so that's the EF broadly um as M just said this kind of kicked out of um some thinking and discussions about you know questions that kept coming up um you know both inside the ethereum foundation and just in this it gives us some more broadly. ✪
Josh_Stark: There are many teams at the EF that interact with the ethereum protocol uh there are some teams that do research and are trying to understand The Cutting Edge of you know what new cryptography will enable and how the protocol could be improved hardened uh made more scalable more useful for human beings uh other teams at the EF might be more involved in development and implementation of how do we actually create the software that's going to implement that protocol and make it function at scale and then some teams are also more involved in the coordination side of things uh convening forums bringing parties together facilitating or mediating discussions and consensus building uh contributing to standards that are used by the ecosystem and many similar questions kept coming up um you know questions around how should a protocol evolved uh when should a protocol ocy or have changes slowed down um how should we even talk about these things and you know how might talking about them in certain ways actually impact uh how the protocol is is. ✪
Josh_Stark: Uh and that led to you know a belief that there were a more general form of this problem out in the world and maybe by understanding the general form of protocols we could understand ethereum better so that's the ethereum foundation and maybe a few ways that we interact with the you know capital P world of protocols um vesh also has to talk a bit about uh hardness so I wrote a blog post I think about 2 years now called Adams institutions and blockchains and this really came out of an effort from myself too I guess our articulate like what I actually believe about this why am I dedicating my career my life to you know making these things work and making them uh serve Humanity um and what is the biggest picture narrative that that makes sense of them and actually makes them fit into the world that I understand and the basic idea here is that I think underneath many of these critical pieces of infrastructure that are civilization relies on things like identity things like money things like. ✪
Josh_Stark: There's this really fundamental capability uh that I call hardness. ✪
Josh_Stark: You know the fact of this shared capability of this shared abstract property is why we can actually sometimes substitute blockchains for institutions you know uh it is certainly true that there are people out there who use a blockchain based money instead of an institutionally based money uh it's also true there are people who use blockchain based um you know financial instruments or is what are essentially contracts uh when they could have used an institutionally based form of the same thing through you know traditional legal systems so if they're substitutes they they must have something at root in common uh between them um the analogy often try to use is that it kind of feels like we are looking at a lot of Technologies and what we now call information Technologies but without the concept of information uh there was a time in the not to distant past when the abstract idea of information didn't exist uh now we understand that you know uh Speech or text. ✪
Josh_Stark: You know uh pieces of a magnetized disc are all just different mediums for information um but that's a pretty novel uh understanding and I think when it comes to things like uh law and money and identity and institutions and blockchains there's a similarly fundamental thing here that if we could identify and articulate clearly maybe we can talk about these things from a uh more distant higher and more understanding vantage point. ✪
Josh_Stark: What actually is hardness and I'll try to keep this brief um it is the ability to make the future more certain in specific ways it is all the ways that we lay down this scaffolding of confidence um onto which we hang and bolt all these complex social infrastructure that our civilization requires uh in the case of identity obviously 1 thing I care about with my identity uh you know the identity of Josh Stark a Canadian citizen uh is that I will continue to be able to use that identity in the future and that someone else can't take it from me and that if someone else were to try to use it they would be some sort of process for me to recover it and be able to continue paying my taxes getting Access to Health Care Etc I care about that future reliability and the way I put this in my terminology is that the source of hardness for certain rules or boundaries of my identity are really they're they're sourced to institutions to you know the system of government the bureaucracies Etc that make up for the Canadian state that have you know been trained over centuries to be quite reliable you know. ✪
Josh_Stark: That's you know a 100 years from now they'll still be following certain instructions we've given them instructions in the form of legislation or or common law or just the you know the systems and rules of of a bureaucracy that have acquired over time um and like an institution can give hardness to an identity so could a blockchain and comparable Ways by providing certain guarantees through its design uh through the incentive it's create through these cryptography that is used to create it uh that it too will be there and functioning in a predictable way 100 years from now. ✪
Josh_Stark: So that is a very brief overview of the idea in a concise application to the world of identity uh there's a lot more in the blog post which I think someone has shared in the chat already and obviously I'm happy to chat about it later but I'll I'll pass it over there to the next speaker. ✪
Montgomery Hart: Okay um hello I'm Chino heart and I am an architectural designer my core research project addressable space covered how um physical addressing schemes and place names in the built environment take on some of the characteristics of digital addressing schemes so um then um a building address and physical space is in some ways similar to um a type of digital information and so historically um to summarize my research um. ✪
Montgomery Hart: Is where it in the 18th and 19th centuries as a result of government consolidation over territories um so a building might um acquire an address in order to collect taxes on that property or to map um the population for government conscription rather than necessarily for wayfinding or the convenience of people navigating physical space so then. ✪
Montgomery Hart: In a way those physical addresses are decoupled and can be decoupled from there um literal locations and um that occurs historically where in some older European cities um addressing schemes or not necessarily consistent with physical location and then I was with my research looking for other examples of that type of informational decoupling in the world such as um elevators skipping floors inside a building the flexibility of business names where the name of a change retail business can point to multiple different physical locations that are all connected by the same name um and then more an example is like Cloud kitchens where 1 place can potentially do business under 2 different names um on a on a delivery app um and with those sharing economy apps there's less user awareness of the destinations involved and those are all very digital characteristics um comparable. ✪
Montgomery Hart: Web address for a website it doesn't you don't necessarily need to have any awareness of where the servers for the website are located and I've been interested in the potential of that decoupling in more areas of our Physical World um especially as we use increasing numbers of screens and digital interfaces such as an elevators or in cars or on our phone to navigate physical space. ✪
Venkatesh_Rao: All right um Dorian you're up next. ✪
Venkatesh_Rao: Okay then let's switch to Spencer. ✪
Wayne Chang: So everyone my name is Spencer um I'm a programmer and artists um focusing on creating ways for uh computers to bring people together um and so for some of protocols um I was an affiliate researcher so I sort of weave between a couple um projects um helping the core researchers uh but my overall Focus was on memory and specifically uh archival practices um that lead us to memory um so uh this took form in 1 uh speculative artifact around uh exploring how we create uh memory through our collections of uh physical things and also digital objects um. ✪
Wayne Chang: Uh send it around this idea of like a memory pouch um which are these uh devices that let you this future device that um could recreate any sort of physical experience into um a perfect reproduction so whether it's through touch or smell or sense um and weaved into sort of how we could bridge that Gap and our existing world now so I sort of create a bunch of these um. ✪
Wayne Chang: Uh memory pouches through available uh tools I had um and so you can see here like I just created this pouch out of like a scarf and um a bag um like a laundry bag that I had um and designating these containers as ways uh for a specific collections of things um I was exploring how that form of archival not only is a form of uh personal expression uh but also through like offers this site of exchange um for creating connection between um communities um and that's sort of uh 1 of the other things I started exploring in summer protocols and have sort of like continued after um in that process um is this open source Library um it's called play HTML um and basically it focuses on that um that exchange through memory um it allows people to create um and design shared web experiences so this is sort of um all real time. ✪
Wayne Chang: Ex like examples here this is sort of like uh internet fridge wall um and people can leave messages here um over time and also collectively shape it um so that's sort of where um my thinking is that now around how to like uh allow create the infrastructure for people to um facilitate these sites of exchange through um the memory and uh archival of things that they care about. ✪
Venkatesh_Rao: All right thanks Spencer and uh I want to quickly share my screen and show um our um website here. ✪
Venkatesh_Rao: So you guys have a sense of where to go look for more so summer protocols calm um if you go and click on the research tab here. ✪
Venkatesh_Rao: You'll see a lot of The Works we've referenced plus a lot more so we're publishing it slowly in the form of what we're calling a protocol kit um so the physical version is like uh printed pieces that go in a screen ring binder but it's all available uh online as well so. ✪
Venkatesh_Rao: I think about 15 20 pieces already published and then another 30 or 40 more coming so this is a lot of content here and um if any of you are interested uh you can request 1 of these protocol kits we have a few left still um so that might be uh fun and interesting and I did want to point out that we have the call for applications for 2024 on and like I mentioned there's a large grant called the protocol Improvement Grant that's 2 people 90,000 over the summer to work on improving the specific protocol and then the protocol pill challenge which is to do little Works to basically mimic fee like make protocols um mean like subject and we are working with a bunch of Partners as well. ✪
Venkatesh_Rao: The applications are due this Friday so so I know it's a very short time but I thought I'd like uh show the program for those of you who might have great ideas to work on and for those of you are curious about what's going on um this year if you go to forum.com and click on this rfc's category you'll see all the ideas that people are proposing to work on this year so I'm kind of excited to dive in and make the you know assessments of which ones might be interesting to fund this year so that'll be my week next week so with that I think I'll stop here and uh we'll take a question so yeah. ✪
Harrison_Tang: All right uh well Chanel do you mind actually go a little bit deeper into uh your research about the uh addressable space like what are the 3 or 4 takeaways when there's a decoupling between physical and digital. ✪
Harrison_Tang: Possible um objects or identities uh if you will because I'm I'm quite interested in this because uh. ✪
Harrison_Tang: Is uh uh I know there's a lot of uh huge companies just working on uh physical addresses right like uh you know trying to cling and standardize them it's always that 8 or 10% that uh messed you up right and uh and also I think uh at w3c cgg we have been talking about uh content addressable IDs uh versus like location addressable IDs and things like that so quite interested to hear your thoughts in regards to um you know the key takeaways when the decoupling happens yeah. ✪
Montgomery Hart: And that's an interesting question 1 of the big takeaways that I found um is that there's the potential for deception and manipulation when the physical and the digital addresses are separate so for instance um I found several examples where buildings were misrepresenting how tall they actually were um potentially um in some cases by um 10 or 20 storeys in height so for instance um there's the phenomenon of um buildings in East Asian countries um eliminating the number for from their floor numbers similarly to how we eliminate the number 13 in Western culture and that's sort of a simple example but there was a building in Vancouver which eliminated all of its floors ending in 4 and then was represented as being almost 10 stories higher than it was because um those floors were eliminated for the number. ✪
Montgomery Hart: For um another building in New York which had a large multi-story empty space between its lower and higher floors so that's 1 kind of potential manipulation which occurs and I'm interested in researching that kind of manipulation which also occurs with Cloud kitchens for example where you can order food and not necessarily know where it's coming from and I mean I'm curious about how that type of manipulation could occur in the future and then um I also think um it's interesting. ✪
Montgomery Hart: Um as the built environment acquires more types of sensors and with things like smart cities or increasing Automation in the built environment could the understanding of how um physical space relates to digital address um that could potentially be relevant for looking at how we map the built environment um. ✪
Montgomery Hart: In terms of um understanding that there's different ways of representing information and um then I also think that that type of information literacy is important when we're using digital interfaces to navigate the built environment such as for instance how elevators are starting to have touchscreens to access the buttons so the floor number is on a building could be reprogrammed. ✪
Our Robot Overlords are scribing.
Venkatesh_Rao: Throw up the visual of your appendix and I did that and that's when you cut out sorry about that I. ✪
<laura_paglione> Same - also got kicked out
Montgomery Hart: Um I mean I think I was um getting close to. ✪
Montgomery Hart: But I was summarizing I mean I guess um the main takeaway um is that um it's important for people and the world to have this kind of literacy about different ways that spatial information can be um sort of mapped and represented because I think that there's going to need to be more and more situations in the future where it's relevant as we get more technology in our physical environment. ✪
Josh_Stark: Uh uh happy to talk about it um yeah I you know I was looking at some of the the docs for this group beforehand and uh seeing the world you know V verifiable come up uh over and over again um I was trying to kind of like look at okay in in how you conceptualize you know what is the thing you're looking at where in this sentence uh is a reference to you know what I might call hardest in the more abstract way and I think it kind of comes down at least in that expression to this verifiability idea I think you know 1 an unstated thing uh when we talk about verified verifiability of some identity claim uh is that it will be verifiable in the future you know we we're not expecting just that for some brief time Horizon uh that this will be verifiable but that there's some sort of you know multi-layered thing here that will persist long into the future and that at the point at which you know um some institution needs to contact me or that there's some sort of insight. ✪
<kaliya_identity_woman> I'm curious how familiar you are with / inpsired by Alexander Gallway's book Protocols How Control Exists after Dentralization - it is a book I found at Strand Books in 2005 and it has inspired me since then in terms of how important protocols are in shaping the world as we know it from DNA to internet protocols.
Josh_Stark: That there will be a way to you know verifiably connect uh some action to some identity uh later on so that's kind of 1 thought I had on that I guess um the others that yes there's many like layers to this um I don't know how practically useful the concept of hardness is in a lot of like the applications of what we're doing because you know as practitioners in an area of some application that is using hardness at Route you already have a pretty sophisticated way of understanding what are the properties of this thing what are the claims that are being made what are the reasons that those claims will be hard in the future I think where we get some use out of the idea is in looking at the kind of you know bigger picture of these systems or in thinking about where there are opportunities to um. ✪
Josh_Stark: I guess like change or alter that that source of hardness right I think that if you understand that at route we're doing a similar thing when we have an institution you know be this durable enduring thing that can last and make certain claims and make certain things true in the future that if we can articulate that in a more abstract way we can maybe look for other systems that provide a similar kind of guarantees or abstract properties and not just assume that there's only only 1 way of doing it I think a lot of what the blockchain world is really doing is trying to dig deeper into you know how we are to use things like money or identity in order to translate them into a different world to A system that provides similar in fundamentally but maybe not exactly the same set of capabilities reforms us I hope some of that was clear will or or was getting at what you're interested what interested in hearing. ✪
Kaliya Young: Sure um I'm just I'm super excited to find the protocol nerds because I'm 1 of them um I just commented I in 2005 I found this book it's strange books called um protocol how control exists after decentralization by Alexander go away and I was just curious how much. ✪
Kaliya Young: 1 If you knew about the book and how much that work had been informed like if you had used it to in inform what you are doing with your. ✪
Kaliya Young: Summer protocols and other research. ✪
Venkatesh_Rao: Yeah happy to respond to that yes that book was on our radar through last year's summer and 1 specific um research project it uh influenced and posting the link in the chat right now um Nadia as perova she did a research project called Dangerous protocols so she studied like how even though right now we are in a little bit of an idealistic utopian um um part of the discourse or most people are excited about how Protocols are better than platforms and how we can get away from the you know downsides of centralized platforms by building P2P or decent life protocols that these things just kind of like transpose the various potential abuses and um you know power struggles and political aspects of platforms to a different key they just rear their heads in a different way plus of course something's improved and their entirely new issues that come up so yeah this was a. ✪
Venkatesh_Rao: Be more fun um research projects um that came out of last summer dangerous protocols uh yeah and I think um. ✪
Venkatesh_Rao: Book kind of like broadly influenced Nadia's essay but it is about I don't know 15 16 years ago and if you look at Google Trends you'll actually see that around uh the time that book came out is when the last peak of like um uh the world protocol in Google Trends happened and I guess because a lot of people were talking about internet protocols for the first time back then that it's kind of slowly declined and recently in the last few years there's been an uptick again and that's mostly due to blockchains and crypto so yeah I think that conversation is finally actually becoming Salient so uh protocol nerds as you say have been around forever but I think this is kind of the historical moment for this topic to take Center Stage so yeah dangerous protocols is 1 and I think several other researchers also looked at the book and uh uh for explored aspects of its teams. ✪
Venkatesh_Rao: I did want to um I forgot to mention earlier in my opening Spiel um. ✪
Venkatesh_Rao: In the partnership things we're doing 1 of the things we might be looking at later in the year is the Swiss e identity um. ✪
Venkatesh_Rao: Uh so we're working with um institution there so that's kind of interesting because I think the Swiss government is the first uh um that project is the first 1 to seriously consider. ✪
<kaliya_identity_woman> Bhutan is doing the same...
Venkatesh_Rao: Some sort of national identity scheme along with the concept of self Sovereign identity and like you know blockchain things like wallets as the identifying artifact so we'll be working on that hopefully in Fall so that should be kind of like a direct link to uh. ✪
Venkatesh_Rao: And another thing we are doing in the summer is with um some folks from the Singapore government uh on basically protocols in Southeast Asia like it's a region that's an archipelago of islands where there's been like a larger diffuse Regional identity but lots of small countries uh similar to the hansi league in Europe and it's kind of interesting how identities emerge in natural historic sort of like decentralized Millions like that so you're going to be studying the history and culture of that region with identity as 1 of the threads there as well. ✪
Venkatesh_Rao: Yeah this is going to be a more this team is going to like keep popping up more and more for us I think. ✪
Kaliya Young: Sure um thanks um have you considered studying protocol Innovation communities. ✪
<josh_stark> two other resources on "hardness" in addition to the blogpost:
Venkatesh_Rao: So we haven't had any so since this is a grants program it's a function of like which projects end up getting proposed and funded so we haven't looked at uh living communities as such directly we did have 1 really interesting project which I already mentioned so David Lang studied the history of Standards um communities so that's of course um more historical so I just posted that link um we did also have 1 Project which we haven't yet published yet by Toby shurin and Kel on. ✪
Venkatesh_Rao: Credentials in science of communities that kind of like uh uh Steward formal Notions of science so like publishing in journals and stuff and how Outsiders ranging from like crackpots to amateur scientists try to network and like join that um community so that's I think an indirect it's not studying a standards or protocols group like this but it's almost closed like peer-reviewed academic disciplines function in very similar ways so that project looked at sort of their practices and how they do gatekeeping and what gets designated as like you know legitimate knowledge versus not and are those practices sound so that was a project um. ✪
<laura_paglione> Can you add a link to that study?
Venkatesh_Rao: In terms of like actively studying groups like this I think that would be enormously interesting and definitely if uh projects like that get proposed I haven't looked through all the proposals for this year yet but if any like that are in there definitely they'll get flagged for a deeper look so yeah it's a topic of definite interest and 1 of the reasons we're running the program the way um we are this year in terms of protocol Improvement Grants is specifically uh to. ✪
Venkatesh_Rao: That uh will kind of like do this. ✪
Venkatesh_Rao: In the course of the research so maybe they want to improve some protocol on like traffic management or whatever and 1 of our expectations is in the course of the project they'll actually connect to the relevant communities and maybe the form their output will take will be to actually try and get a standard or spec through that particular body or committee and we think we'll learn a lot of metal lessons about how these processes work across um uh groups and disciplines uh by doing that so not explicitly studying the community's the way an anthropologist might but sort of like studying them through the process of actually trying to like you know work through them to get something done so that that's what we are calling protocol entrepreneurship so we hope our handful of protocol entrepreneurship will give us some sample data points on how these things work in different communities does that answer your question. ✪
Kaliya Young: Um it does and I would say that I think we have a gold mine of data um with I think we started keeping. ✪
Kaliya Young: Actually there's some documentation for from before but for sure like every iaw since iaw 7 has had a book of proceedings which is sort of notes of all the all the all the sessions. ✪
Kaliya Young: Significant body of of data to kind of mine and sort of understand the life of sort of how does and I how does something start out as an idea on our our agenda wall for example. ✪
Kaliya Young: Cloud ldap was something a gentleman named RL Bob has passed away sadly put up on our wall and that became a protocol. ✪
Kaliya Young: Um that's standardized at the ITF called skim right and that's happened to several other protocols but. ✪
Kaliya Young: That happen you know and like why is. ✪
Kaliya Young: What can we learn about what's happened within this sort of protocol Nest to inform it and anyways so it's I'm just sharing like if you have a grand students or or researchers in your. ✪
Kaliya Young: I I think there's an interesting place to like explore with us as a community and I hope we can I hope it happens sometime as I'm very happy to have met you guys and and excited to dive into the work you've been doing. ✪
Venkatesh_Rao: And let me actually turn that around and say since we do have the program open and the deadline is in a few days if anyone from this community is interested in putting in for uh like um I think this would be actually very suitable for 1 of our micrograms um I think it would so last year we tried to do something like this like 1 of the projects attempted to do oral histories of people who've been through such standards processes that project didn't work out unfortunately but I think um 1 thing that would be very interesting is if somebody from this community um put in a proposal for uh micro Grant to just write like a I don't know informal history of these 38 things that you mentioned like that's a lot for um random outside lay person to dive into both in terms of quantity but also in terms of like literacy and competence and interpreting what they're reading so I think 1 really valuable kind of um uh work we could fund and we'd love to see applications for that is um you know just a. ✪
<harrison_tang> i think we can just get someone to interview you, Kaliya, to get a history of this identity community ;)
Venkatesh_Rao: Providing the history of all right there's this community and this is what it's achieved over its lifetime and here's a couple of like anecdotal examples of how this process works and lessons you can take away from it so I think that would actually be um a perfect little project to do as part of the summer protocols and uh more generally I I would love it if you guys um sort of like hung out a little bit on our Forum so Forum that summer of protocols calm and sort of like share the benefit of your accumulated wisdom with our community so we have lots of General topics we have lots of specific research threads going on so yeah any comments you can share sort of like referencing your own experiences that would be. ✪
Venkatesh_Rao: Yeah and you know maybe don't want so to reinforce what Josh said Josh said about subtraction the way we are approaching the idea of like a protocol science or protocol studies is not that this particular small group that happened to started last year and however long this program lasts maybe a few years uh it'll do certain amount of work but we kind of want what we want to do is have a catalytic effect and basically plant the seeds of the idea of protocols as a general thing worthy of study in lots of other spaces including um your group so what we'd love to see happen is beyond your specific work on credentials and Technical standards around those if you kind of like started a thread of thinking and discourse in your own Community about these broader things and sort of like connected with other groups doing that including us and we start seeing a little bit of like cross-pollination and like cross discourse of like hey you guys had just had a very tough time getting a particular standard. ✪
<kaliya_identity_woman> I have dreamed about doing a PhD on protocols! :)
Venkatesh_Rao: Very tricky issues maybe there's a lesson there that you can quickly abstract and uh Post in other forums that might be of interest so we kind of want to create a decentralized network of protocol studies people or protocol nerds. ✪
Venkatesh_Rao: Yeah dreamed about doing a PhD on protocols I think that's increasingly going to be a thing that we are hoping there'll be a whole field of people doing phds on protocols. ✪
<kaliya_identity_woman> Thank you for coming and sharing your work. I have to run.
Wayne Chang: I I have this like shortcut that runs on my phone and every time I sort of have this gratitude for life I like run the shortcut and it takes a picture and logs the date and time um so that's like the range of how uh different it can be um and then yeah the physical 1 is enabled me to uh I sort of just think about like that specific um category of archival whenever I take the bag and so I have 1 that's sort of like aimed at like flowers and so whenever I go out and sort of like more um. ✪
Wayne Chang: To pay attention to flowers um yeah so I think it's really. ✪
Wayne Chang: Changed the way um I don't know I look at the world or I sort of have these different textures or lenses for viewing the world through. ✪
<harrison_tang> thanks for hopping on and sharing these research!