Public sector teams must go beyond the in-house or off-the-shelf dichotomy to take advantage of open protocols, which offer a unique way to manage both software costs and geopolitical exposure
The Purpose of Protocols
Every open social protocol generates shared resources, but none has produced a governance framework adequate to those resources. So who fills that vacuum?
The Purpose of Protocols
Every open social protocol generates shared resources, but none has produced a governance framework adequate to those resources. So who fills that vacuum?
Dangerous Protocols - Summer of Protocols
Protocols are frequently touted as the liberating alternative to walled technological gardens, but the historical purpose of protocols has always been to simplify decision-making and reduce human agency. How do we reconcile these two narratives? I explore the dangerous side of protocols, and how their ability to drive coordination means they also have
Introducing the Protocol Institute
Building a field and community to steward the planetary-scale process of protocolization
Open source engagement in organizations
Companies, governments, and other organizations big and small are working with open source to achieve their goals. Teams range from barely considering it to ...
Protocols for Publishers
A series bringing together publishers, developers, and researchers to explore open protocols for a sustainable agentic web.
How can open social protocols fail us in 2025 | shazow.net
Let’s compare the possible failure modes of various open social protocols: ActivityPub/Mastodon ATProto/Bluesky Farcaster/Warpcast Some scenarios I’d like to …
What is open communication?
Open source collaboration requires open communication, they say. Just what is open communication, exactly? Drawing on past research [1], here are the four principles that make communication open. O…
Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech
What is clear is that there is no simple solution to these challenges, and most of the ones that are normally presented tend not to deal with the reality of the problems or to understand the technical and societal challenges that likely make them impossible.
A Framework of Open Practices
This is the second in a series of posts describing findings from industry research into best practices around open, collaborative methods…
Block - Open Source
By collaborating in the open, we create higher quality software, hardware, and protocols through relentless collective examination, and also ensure our systems, hardware, and protocols evolve to meet real-world needs.
The Politics of Open Infrastructures: Power, Governance, and Justice in Digital Knowledge Practices
This volume examines how openness is designed, governed, contested and lived in contemporary digital knowledge infrastructures. From open source software and internet standards, to citizen science platforms, public sector data systems and alternative computing practices, the book shows that infrastructures are never neutral technical backbones.
What Is Open Source Strategy? — Open Tech Strategies | Blog
There is a lot of documentation out there on how to do open source well at the project level. Historically, many projects have been started by developers, often on their own initiative, and the first non-technical questions they faced tended to be about project coordination (like "What collaboration tools shall we use?" or "What will our code review practices be?") and about community management (like "How do we decide who has commit access?" and "How do we integrate newcomers smoothly?"). Because developers hate to solve the same problems over and over, there is a wealth of detailed and varied material addressing those sorts of questions (we've even written some ourselves, but it's just a drop in the bucket of what's available). Taken together, this literature thoroughly answers the question "How do we execute the best tactics for developing open source software?"
Web publishing is facing its next challenge: a new iteration of centralizing platforms. BUT there is also a new wave of open protocols+standards to gain independence. Next month in NYC let's discuss how we can sail into this next platform shift as captains. #ProtocolsForPublishers pfp.unternet.co
Protocols for Publishers
pfp.unternet.coAnother reason why it’s so important that we have open protocols for social media.
Kai Kupferschmidt
One of the issues that has come up again and again in my reporting on misinformation and social media is the massive influence social media companies have on research in the field. Last night a preprint dropped that tries to get at this with some numbers. My piece in @science.org (and 🧪🧵 coming):
