Social Protocols
= "Social protocols are codified procedures that coordinate human behavior". [1]
Description
From Joseph M. Riegle, Jr. at http://www.w3.org/Talks/980922-MIT6805/SocialProtocols.html
"Social protocol" is a term I use to discuss protocols (or their applications) that enable individuals and communities to express social capabilities. This would include tools necessary for creating rich content, managing trust relationships, making verifiable assertions or recommendations, and enabling agent assisted (or automatic) decision making. The ability to make verifiable assertions, to build reputation, to solicit advice, and defer to a trusted source are all real world capabilities. This is what meat space relationships are built upon. If we want sophisticated cyberspace relationships, we will need similar mechanisms.
Social protocols have substantive policy issues related to their development -- as do many other protocols, such as DNS. However, the key difference between a social protocol and something like DNS is that little social behavior, cues, or relationships are carried through DNS. The key function of social protocols is to express and operate upon such information for users and their computer agents."
(http://www.w3.org/Talks/980922-MIT6805/SocialProtocols.html)
Example
Time as a Social Protocol
Saffron Huang:
"Timekeeping is a device-mediated social protocol—various forms of timekeeping, supported by different tools, dictate how one may mark or tell time. In ancient times, shadows commonly denoted temporality: Aristophanes’ play Assembly of Women features a woman who asks her husband to return when his shadow reaches ten feet. Today, our timekeeping is based mostly on constructed standards of seconds, minutes, and hours, not accessible natural phenomena. Our modern infrastructure of precise clockware based on the oscillations of atoms and crystals enables people to show up for work at the same time, give directions, align on temporal measurements, and coordinate distributed software systems.
How does timekeeping affect our lives and are some forms of timekeeping better than others? All protocols constrain—the Catania sundial made this fact obvious to the Roman citizens.
...
When Roman war hero Valerius Maximus Messalla brought back a sundial from Catania after capturing the city in 263 BC, the crowds cheered—but this symbolic triumph over the Sicilian city soon became an ironic triumph over the lives of Roman citizens. The foreign timekeeping device, installed in the Roman Forum, heralded many more that were soon erected across Rome. People resisted the new technology—criticizing them, as the playwright Plautus did with reference to the superior timekeeping of his stomach, and calling for them to be torn down with crowbars. According to David Rooney—a horologist who shows how timekeeping has shaped our lives and society in the book About Time—the sundials stood for Rome’s ruling classes."
(https://summerofprotocols.com/control-and-consciousness-of-time-web)
Discussion
Towards Social DNA
Benjamin Life:
"Imagine with me for a moment, protocols functioning as genetic information for social organisms. If DNA composes cells and cells compose organisms, protocols compose what OpenCivics calls social organisms, self-organizing groups that function like a superorganism of people working together towards shared aims.
At its core, DNA is a set of instructions, protocols for assembling and maintaining an organism. The DNA is not the organism itself. The organism is made of blood and bone, nerve and muscle, the irreducible complexity of living tissue. But the DNA is the packet of patterns that allows that organism to be created, maintained, and reproduced. It is compressed information that, when expressed in the right environment, generates something vastly more complex than itself.
Social DNA works the same way. Every functioning group has protocols, whether or not it calls them that. When I show up to my reading group, there is a protocol for how we open the meeting, how we structure the conversation, how we close. When I sit down in a work meeting, there is a protocol for how the agenda is established and how the team moves through it. A neighborhood potluck has protocols for who brings what, when people arrive, how the space is shared. A protest march has protocols for communication, safety, and de-escalation.
These protocols are the social DNA of every group, every community, every movement. They are the compressed instructions that allow a social organism to cohere, function, and reproduce itself. And like biological DNA, they carry the accumulated intelligence of every iteration that came before. The reading group’s opening ritual exists because someone, at some point, discovered that starting cold leads to stilted conversation. The work meeting’s agenda protocol exists because someone learned that unstructured meetings devolve into power dynamics. Each protocol encodes a lesson, usually hard-won, about what patterns of interaction actually work.
Here is where the analogy becomes actionable: DNA can be shared. It can adapt. It can evolve.
You would never transplant one organism with its own contextually evolved DNA into a completely different environment and expect it to thrive. But one genetic structure will gradually evolve into another as environmental conditions change. One particular gene sequence confers resilience to drought while another makes it easier to survive a flood. The information travels through selective pressures that modify genetic expressions based on local needs.
Social protocols work in the same way. The spreadsheet template that emerged from the North Carolina disaster relief effort, the one tracking who needs what and where, might have almost exactly the right fields for a community in coastal Louisiana preparing for the next hurricane season. But in that community, there might be a culturally specific category that doesn’t appear in the original template. A column for tracking who speaks Creole, perhaps, or a field for which families have boats. The protocol forks. It adapts. The underlying pattern of interaction persists, but its expression becomes indigenous to the new context.
Because social protocols are reproduced through actual human relationships, because they exist at the level of real interactions between real people, they carry something that purely technical protocols never can: cultural context. A protocol for mutual aid doesn’t just describe a logistical process. It describes a relationship. And relationships bring with them accountability, trust, reciprocity, and the slow accumulation of shared meaning that transforms independent actors into mutually embedded and interdependent communities."
(https://omniharmonic.substack.com/p/protocols-of-place)
Towards Protocol Literacy
Benjamin Life:
"Protocol literacy starts with noticing. Which protocols in the groups you belong to actually work? Which ones generate trust, distribute decision-making well, and make coordination feel almost effortless? And where are the friction points: the recurring conflicts, the coordination failures, the moments where a group’s implicit protocols break down and no one knows quite why? The act of naming a protocol, making the implicit explicit, is itself a transformative intervention. It turns habitual coordination into something that can be examined, refined, and shared. And once people begin thinking in terms of protocols, they start to see opportunities everywhere: places where a simple, well-designed pattern of interaction could resolve chronic dysfunction, reduce the burden on individual leaders, or make a group dramatically more resilient.
This is the social dimension that purely technical protocol development often overlooks. Protocols don’t propagate through repositories. They propagate through relationships: through practitioners who carry patterns from one context to another, adapting as they go. The most important vector for protocol distribution is not a database. It is a person who has experienced a protocol working, who understands why it works, and who can translate it into a new context with sensitivity to local conditions.
But local protocol literacy is only half the equation. For protocol development to scale beyond isolated communities into interconnected ecologies, we need something that functions as a protocol pattern language: a shared vocabulary, taxonomy, and set of descriptive conventions that allow people working on protocols in radically different contexts to recognize common structures, discover each other’s work, and compose their protocols into larger, interoperable systems. Think locally in terms of protocols. Think globally in terms of protocol pattern languages.
Consider how stigmergic coordination works in the natural world. Ant colonies achieve extraordinary feats of distributed coordination: building complex architecture, optimizing foraging routes, mounting collective defense without any centralized command. What makes this possible is not individual capacity but a remarkably simple shared signaling system: a small set of pheromone signals that encode information about what has been done, what needs doing, and where attention is required. Each ant responds to the signals it encounters and deposits its own, and the collective intelligence of the colony emerges from the accumulation of these local interactions. The protocol movement needs its own pheromone trail. Not a centralized registry that dictates what protocols should look like, but a pattern language: a shared set of categories, structures, and conventions that makes it possible for protocol developers working in one watershed to discover that someone on another continent has solved a structurally identical coordination problem.
This kind of shared language does not emerge spontaneously. It requires precisely the kind of deliberate human coordination that characterized the early era of the internet. When TCP/IP was being developed, when the Internet Engineering Taskforce was finding its governance rhythms, a relatively small group of people with shared commitments made intentional choices about shared standards, not to constrain what could be built on the network, but to ensure that what was built could interoperate. The protocols themselves remained open, forkable, evolvable. But the language for describing them, the categories for organizing them, the conventions for documenting them, these required a convening function. We are at an analogous moment for social protocols. The work of developing individual protocols can and should remain radically decentralized, emerging from the living intelligence of communities responding to their own conditions. But the meta-work of establishing a shared pattern language — creating the conditions for stigmergic coordination between protocol developers, building the interoperability layer that allows discrete protocols to compose into functioning ecologies — requires people and organizations willing to do the unglamorous infrastructure work of building shared taxonomies, hosting cross-pollinating dialogue, and maintaining the connective tissue that allows a thousand independent efforts to become something larger than any one community could build alone."