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Guest Talk with Kyle Mathews | Designing for Soft Protocols: A Discord Bot Workshop

TalkKyle Mathews
Guest Talk with Kyle Mathews | Designing for Soft Protocols: A Discord Bot Workshop

Kyle Mathews, introduced by Venkatesh Rao (referred to as 'vanet'), led a hands-on workshop distinguishing 'hard protocols' (rigid, software-enforced, testable like Greenhouse's hiring flow) from 'soft protocols' (governing, influence-based, running partly in human 'wetware' like Twitter's emergent norms). Participants broke into small groups to design a Discord bot for bookmarking/sharing links within the Summer of Protocols community, producing user stories around prioritization, auto-tagging, digests, and feeds, followed by reflections (notably from David Lang and Cara) questioning whether such categorization tools would actually be adopted or whether the exercise merely reinforced existing Discord-centric work patterns.

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