Protopolis Lab

= "investigates and prototypes civic protocols and emerging technologies that enable collective life to flourish—in tomorrow’s polis, networks, and habitats".

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Description

About Protopolis Lab:

"Protopolis” fuses “proto” and “polis,” evoking the iterative prototyping of civic protocols within the city-as-commons—a public realm of governance, reciprocity, and collective imagination. The physical and digital are increasingly collapsing into a single, responsive fabric. In an era of self-writing code, multiple accelerating intelligences, eroding institutional trust, and cascading shocks—from global pandemics to climate risks—our coordination mechanisms must evolve as quickly as the crises they address. Guided by classical notions of the polis alongside contemporary philosophies of distributed agency, co-constitution of nature and artifice, and solarpunk imaginaries of commoning, the Lab treats the polis as a living prototype whose rules are adapted and written in an open-ended way.

Unconstrained by any single discipline, Protopolis Lab operates in an omnidisciplinary mode, fluent in the vocabularies of designers, engineers, scientists, philosophers, artists, and social scientists alike. Through a blend of rigorous inquiry of both big data and small data, on-the-ground experimentation, and speculative design, the Lab catalogs and interprets emerging phenomena in the protocolized polis while also building civic toolkits, governance playbooks, and open-source protocol libraries—resources that empower communities to co-create more resilient ways of living together. Beyond academic papers and conference talks, Protopolis Lab is dedicated to producing a range of other outputs—including digital and physical prototypes, open-source toolkits and datasets, audio-visual storytelling, exhibitions and installations, participatory workshops, and curriculum development."

Research

Sentient Networks and Intelligence as Commons:

"Treating intelligence itself as a shared commons rather than a proprietary asset, we examine the ontological foundations and governance challenges of AI in pursuit of a more equitable protopolis. As development shifts from centralized stacks to decentralized paradigms, our research maps the architectures and governance logics of distributed AI—on-chain inference layers, self-sovereign agents as a form of artificial life, and permissionless computation—and evaluates protocols that keep these systems non-extractive and publicly accountable. In parallel, we draw on Eastern philosophical traditions—especially Buddhist ideas of impermanent embodiment—to question the mind–body assumptions embedded in contemporary AI alignment debates. The pillar equips scholars and practitioners with evidence-based pathways toward plural, accountable, and commons-oriented intelligence infrastructures."

More information

Publications:

● Rong, H.* Governing the Commons in Web 3.0? A Social Network Analysis of CityDAO and the Myth of Decentralization of Blockchain-Based Governance.

● Rong, H.* Fractional Property Ownership and Collective Governance in Local Development: A Conceptual Framework. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4353724.

● Tan, JZ., Merk, T., Hubbard, S., Oak, ER., Rong., H., Pirovich, J., Rennie, E. ... Open Problems in DAOs. https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.19201.

● Rong, H.*, Hollander, J. Blockchain-Based Civic Participation: Web 3.0 Technologies in Action.

● Rong, Helena and David Dam. “From Community Currency to Crypto City Tokens: Potentials, Shortfalls, and Future Outlooks of New Old Ideas.” June 15, 2023. Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. (link)

● Rong, Helena and Zeslene Mao. “Deep-Dive into CityDAO: An Experiment in Collective Land Ownership and Decentralized Governance.” June 14, 2023. Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. (link)

● Rong, Helena and Er Li Peng. “Connected Digital Society: Paving Ways for Country-Scale Digital Interoperability in Estonia.” June 14, 2023. Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. (link)

● Rong, Helena. “When URL Meets IRL in Web3: Lessons for Decentralized Trust-Building Technologies in Democratic Governance.” May 3, 2023. Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. (link)

● Rong, H.*, Yang, J. and Qian, W.J. (2020). Enabling Participatory Actions in Community Design and Management: A Collective Intelligence Digital Platform in Ang Sila, Thailand. Landscape Architecture Frontiers, 8(4), pp.126-139. https://doi.org/10.15302/J-LAF-1-040017

● Rong, H.*, Yang, J., Chegut, A. Identifying and Measuring Architectural Design Features for Financial Asset Valuation. Journal of Sustainable Real Estate, 17(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/19498276.2025.2475641.

● Chegut, Andrea, Minkoo Kang, Helena Rong, and Juncheng Yang (2025). Value of Design: Creating Agency Through Data-Driven Insights. Applied Research + Design/ ORO Editions.

● Rong, H., Chen, J. “Cyberbuddhism”: Framing Artificial Intelligence from a Eastern Philosophical Perspective.

● Hu, BA., Rong, H.*, Tay, J. Is Decentralized Artificial Intelligence Governable? Towards Machine Sovereignty and Human Symbiosis. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5110089.

● Hu, BA., Liu, Y., Rong, H.* Trustless Autonomy: Understanding Motivations Behind Deploying Self-Sovereign Decentralized AI Agents on Blockchain and Trust Execution Environments. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2505.09757.

● Hu, BA., Rong, H. Spore in the Wild: Case Study on Spore. fun, a Real-World Experiment of Sovereign Agent Open-ended Evolution on Blockchain with TEEs. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04236.

● Hu, BA., Rong, H. On the Day They Experience: Awakening Self-Sovereign Experiential AI Agents. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.14893