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 p2p style social coordination and open protocols, in order to develop pathways to formalization (i.e., scalability and reproducibility) beyond institutional enclosure.

Our work involves two elements: a) ethnographic research by way of interviews, on the ground encounters with communities and nonstandard urban systems, and explorations of the historical and conceptual 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.

In a word, our work asks: What are the deep structural resonances between urban social protocols and the decentralized and degenerate web, what are the higher order insights about self-organization, "underground" values and network power that can be gained from this analogy, and how can this analogy be transformed into alliance?

Research outputs: An Introduction to Open Protocols Sketches Toward a Theory of the Protocol Underground What is Ethereum Localism? Open Protocols, Extitutions, Undercapital: Research Vectors of the Open Protocol Research Group (Local DAO Summer Talk)

As yet unpublished work includes documentation of an interview with the founder of City Repair, Mark Lakeman and design extrapolations of the 'undercapital' thesis as directed to local DAOs and urban centered protocols (as well as a more formal extrapolation of the undercapital landscape). We are also in the process of forging contributions to the Open Civics Open Protocol Library. ☀️🌱

With an eye toward the Open Civics Collaborative Research round, we can name three milestones for different funding goals (as suggested by round operators):

1st level (~$1000): Help with basic sustainability for current work load. Beyond the City Repair interview, 2-3 more are carried out, edited published (while informing further research and design).

2nd level ($3000): Helps to enable dedicated hours for further extrapolations and design areas from the research. Beyond the City Repair interview, 3-5 more are carried out, edited & published (while informing further research and design). Helps provide work hours for a talk at GFEL summarizing key the themes above.

3rd level ($5000): First two levels, plus the room to afford substantive conceptual and practical development to the concepts at hand. Two research informed pieces (not including the forthcoming work on undercapital) further developing the open protocol thesis. Book length work published under Creative Commons license is begun.