Summer of Protocols Office Hours 0

TalkTim, Venkatesh RaoMarch 20, 2023

An open Q&A office-hours session where Summer of Protocols organizers (including Venkatesh Rao and Tim) field questions from prospective applicants about the core-researcher and affiliate-researcher tracks, writing sample requirements, and team versus individual applications. They clarify that affiliates are meant to support core researchers' projects rather than pursue fully independent team proposals, and advise applicants to move from specific examples to general theory rather than starting with abstract claims about protocols.

Topics

core-researcher-vs-affiliate-researcher-roles governance organizations program-application-process protocol-as-codified-behavior-stratum specific-to-general-application-framing town-hall writing-sample-selection

Related resources

Talk

Into the Spannungsfeld (SIG Kickoff)

Robert Peake kicks off his special interest group on the 'Spanungsfeld' (field of tensions), building on tension-mapping workshops from Edge City Esmeralda and Edge City Lana, and drawing on landscape theory of aggregation to argue that organizations and protocols must be understood as fields of coupled trade-offs and social conflicts rather than isolated engineering decisions. Venkatesh Rao joins to extend the discussion with concepts like agonistics, emotional homeostasis in organizations, cursed problems in game design, Schelling's micromotives and macro behavior, and the idea of 'unmanaged tension fields,' proposing that protocols function as tools for decoupling complex systems and managing chronic, unsolvable tensions rather than solving them outright.

Robert Peake, Venkatesh Rao

Talk

Summer of Protocols Town Hall

Tim and Venkatesh Rao (joined by Josh Davis) introduce the Summer of Protocols program, explaining its origins in Ethereum Foundation discussions about understanding protocol evolution and its goal of building broader 'protocol literacy' across disciplines. Venkatesh outlines the program structure—core researchers, affiliates, guest speakers, and residents—emphasizing open, collaborative 'hackathon-style' work, writing essays plus 'protocolish artifacts,' and fielding extensive audience Q&A on applications, funding, and inclusivity.

Venkatesh Rao, Josh Davis, Tim Beiko

Talk

Governance Axioms

Eric Alston presents a framework of five recurring 'governance axioms' for protocol design—incomplete rules, governance-as-conflict, mechanical concentration of authority, asymmetric incentives from shared resources, and the transparency-privacy tradeoff—arguing these tensions can never be designed away, only managed through mechanisms like killswitches, veto-gates, and tiered amendment rules. Drawing on his experience advising Cardano's constitution, DAOs, and peace processes, Alston contends that 'incomplete rules' mean norms and discretion inevitably fill gaps left by any formally encoded protocol, and that durable systems require 'dynamic fidelity'—credible commitments combined with constrained capacity for adaptation rather than either permanent rigidity or unchecked flux.

Eric Alston