Protocols serve as detailed guidelines or frameworks that outline specific steps to be followed to achieve desired outcomes. Open protocols are specific types of public goods that establish infrastructure for open civic systems. Protocols usually include: - **Objective:** The purpose and goal of the protocol - **Scope**: What's included and excluded in the protocol - **Procedures**: Step by step instructions to achieve the objective - **Roles and responsibilities:** Who is responsible for each action within the procedures - **Materials and equipment:** What’s required to carry out the procedures - **Guidelines:** Suggested considerations while conducting procedures - **Documentation:** Suggestions on how to document the outcomes of the procedures Open protocols are a subset of protocols that are openly documented and freely available for anyone to use, implement, and modify. They are developed and maintained through collaborative, transparent processes, often involving multiple stakeholders. Open protocols related to self-organizing systems are categorized according to their function. These categories include membership thresholds, membranes (circles and sub-circles), decision-making, sense-making, resource allocation, coordination and collaboration, learning, and culture. In the case of the OpenCivics Innovation Framework, open protocols are documented and made available through the knowledge commons, and most specifically, a subset of the commons which acts as an “open protocol library”. ### **Open Protocol Strategy** Open protocols can be generally understood as recipes, templates, or DNA packets for social organisms. By describing the formal and informal processes for different types of social organisms, these protocols support the propagation and experimentation of new civic utilities that operate according to living systems principles. Unlike official legal or institutional protocols which operate as standardized and prescriptive rules, open protocols are formalized through extitutional groups who adopt them as guiding principles and scaffolding for emergent self-organization. Open protocols are designed to proliferate based on their _utility_, evaluated by their capacity to provide improved quality of life for humans and the living world. Their adoption is inherently voluntary, experimental, and iterative, with each group’s implementation of a given protocol contributing to its ongoing refinement and development. Protocols allow for coherent self-organization by making the parameters of governance, contribution, and attribution transparent, co-stewarded, and clear by formalizing relationships of flow without the need for centralized control. Stigmergic coordination is supported by protocolization that clearly defines how autonomous actions can synergize as part of a broader organismic effort. Utilizing the OpenCivics Innovation Framework as a meta-protocol, open protocols can be easily documented in a modular fashion, supporting remixing, local adaption, and decentralized research. Technologists and community organizers can leverage the power of this universal pattern language to promote the increased functionality and utility of technologies and community efforts by linking them with a broader, decentralized, open source social systems design community. Linked knowledge databases of open protocols, ideally federated and interoperable with one another themselves, provide a public good that empowers direct action and collective stewardship of our communities and commons. Eventually leveraged as training data for customized Large Language Models, Artificial Intelligence assistants will be able to support community members and organizers to discover, learn about, and deploy open protocols in their communities. Open protocols are a critical evolution of the work of Elinor Ostrom whose principles of commons governance define many of the key considerations of open protocol designers and community practitioners. By evolving the work of commons governance into a socio-technical engineering stack for the public itself, investment in the work to develop open protocols serves to effectively “compost capital” by generating self-sustaining, post-capitalist, local resilience and self-determination. Orienting the broad and multi-disciplinary fields of all pro-social impact entrepreneurship around the development process of open protocol development in turn will catalyze a massively disruptive and rapid phase transition in humanity’s collective and collaborative capacity to address fundamental, systemic, and existential crises we face as a species. Only through a renewed culture of civic engagement, combined with the tools of open protocols for civic utilities, can a fully stigmergic and decentralized coordination response to our present crises occur. Further distributed research is needed to collate existing and novel approaches to each of the specific components of open protocols. Many bodies of work, ranging from formally defined processes like ProSocial.world, Theory U, Warm Data Labs and Sociocracy to entire fields of research in knowledge ecology, value accounting, governance, currency design, systems mapping, and blockchain DAO smart contracts are necessary to fully document and structure the diverse scope of component functions of open protocols. The OpenCivics Innovation Framework attempts to generate a “schelling point” or basin of attraction for the coordination of the development of open protocols by offering an overarching structure by which the component parts of open protocols can be categorized and referenced. Mechanisms to facilitate this process are described in detail in the final section of this thesis. ### **The Nature Of Protocols | The Protocols Of Nature** ![[The Nature Of Protocols - The Protocols Of Nature]]