The Open Protocol Research Group is the research contingent of Ethereal Forest, consisting of Macks Wolf, Exeunt and Ven Gist. We work to identify analogue-world parallels to the decentralized web, including peer-to-peer coordination and open protocols, in order to develop pathways to formalization beyond institutional enclosure.
Our work involves two elements: a) ethnographic research by way of interviews, on the ground encounters with communities and informal urban systems, and explorations of the historical and theoretical archive, b) the development of practical concepts meant to enable alliances between the extitutional web and what we have called the urban protocol underground.
Examples of practical concepts developed and being explored up to this point include:
open protocols - compound protocols that include technical-material knowledge sets (including social technology) and culturally encoded commitments to divergence and empirical imagination. When military scientists experiment with LSD, its by use of protocols; when the Merry Pranksters spread the same chemical as a tool for open ended interior and social experimentation, it is an open protocol.
extitutions - distinguished from and owing to Jessy Kate Schingler and Primavera de Filippi’s extitutional theory, extitutions name formal organizations, though often loosely bound and/or temporary, that work primarily to encourage the free propagation of protocols under open and divergent conditions. Extitutions often help to formalize or codify aspects of a protocol meant to protect its open, permissive, free associative and empirical nature. (While historical extitutions often existed on a totally informal and underground basis, extitutions that we have explored in the city more often take the form of traditional businesses or nonprofits, leading to the insight that ‘extitutions often wear institutional masks.’
undercapital - our term for the combinatorial problem space of Gregory Landua and Ethan Roland’s Eight Forms of Capital when considered together with the three functions of money and directed toward divergent or extitutional ends. Being developed in conjunction with a more nascent concept of virtual capital, explained in the final slides of our recent Local DAO Summer talk.
Research outputs:
An Introduction to Open Protocols
Sketches Toward a Theory of the Protocol Underground
Open Protocols, Extitutions, Undercapital: Research Vectors of the Open Protocol Research Group (Local DAO Summer Talk)
Forthcoming work includes documentation of an interview with the founder of City Repair, Mark Lakeman and design extrapolations of the undercapital thesis in for local DAOs and urban centered protocols. Research is done with an eye toward developing and cataloguing protocols for the Open Civics Open Protocol Library.