







Building a field and community to steward the planetary-scale process of protocolization
Inventing New Nature
Defining the Protocol Institute's research mission

Protocol Reader - Summer of Protocols
The Protocol Reader The Protocol Reader is an 358-page book (currently only available as an epub) comprising 26 foundational essays by 31 authors from the Summer of Protocols program, carefully edited and sequenced to introduce you to the fascinating new discipline of Protocol Studies. It can serve as

Why a New Protocol? The History and Future of AT Protocol - AT Protocol
Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee and Head of Protocol Daniel Holmgren join for a wide-ranging conversation about what atproto is, why it exists, how it got built, and where it's going next. From a Twitter consultancy to an IETF working group, this is where to get started.

Protocol Reader - Summer of Protocols
In the Fall of 2022, the word protocol was suddenly everywhere. The proximal cause was obvious: fueled, in part, by the highly visible and fractious change of ownership at Twitter, large numbers of people began heading for the exits. Most of them, of course, were just looking for

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?

Call for Participation: AT Protocol Ecosystem Action Research - Ecosystem Action
A pilot program to facilitate cooperative, research-led innovation in the AT Protocol ecosystem.
Call for Participation: AT Protocol Ecosystem Action Research - Ecosystem Action
A pilot program to facilitate cooperative, research-led innovation in the AT Protocol ecosystem.
A Government Guide to Open Protocols
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

AT Protocol builder manifesto - WIP, comments wanted!
working title: "Why AT Protocol Will Win: A Manifesto for Building in the Atmosphere"
Protocolly Atmoseed - AT Protocol
News from around the Atmosphere, including a proposal to fix localhost, more webdevs getting into atproto, Mu Social's opinionated news feed, and more.

From ZK-first to AT Protocol — our path to DDS | Agora Citizen Network
We've been building Agora — a platform for public deliberation using Polis-style clustering — for a while now. Along the way, we've written about what we think about Nostr, AT Protocol, Polis, Community Notes, and protocol interoperability. Those posts are somewhat outdated now. This one describes w...
Challenges: Trivial, Grand, and Whitehead
Introducing the Protocol Institute Challenges program

Long Now Lab 001: Protocols for the Long Now
Lab 001.1 is part of the [Protocols for the Long Now](https://longnow.org/labs/001) lab series. Civilizations run on protocols — shared norms for how we keep time, store knowledge, and make decisions together.

Theorizing Protocolization II: Atomic Protocol Questions
Solving real coordination problems to discover the formal laws of protocols.

Willow - Protocols for an uncertain future (FOSDEM'26)
Centralised systems were designed with the best of intentions, but were turned against us anyway. And peer-to-peer systems will be exactly the same. How do we make the next generation of protocols ...