It's first important to distinguish between the contemporary technological connotation of the term protocol and the biocultural and socio-technical context in which it is utilized in this thesis. Similarly, open protocols are a new body of research and applied knowledge that further shift how protocols are perceived and interacted with. Put together, the framing of open protocols presented in this thesis refer to adaptive, contextual, and consent-based patterns of interaction that support sovereign and interdependent social interactions. Throughout living systems and indigenous cultures, protocols are an underlying pattern language of interaction that produce flows of reciprocity and right relationship. In indigenous cultures, protocol is often utilized to refer to the practices and procedures of ceremony and ritual interactions. These protocols are not abstract or performative in the sense that they have emerged organically from thousands of years of high context cultures. Within high context cultures, relationships are mediated through a greater depth of embeddedness within our ecologies and social relationships, contrasted by low context cultures in which monolithic patterns are imposed on a variety of circumstances across diverse contexts. In the indigenous sense, protocols are patterns of interaction that produce intact relational fields. Within a living systems context, protocols can be understood as the pattern languages utilized by plant and animal life to produce emergent structures through stigmergic coordination. In the context of many insects, a simple protocol pattern language composed of pheromone signals produces patterns of interaction that stack the contributions of each individual into a swarm intelligence that produces a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Unlike traditional institutions, extitutions are the product of open protocols, patterns of interaction that are adopted through consent and can be modified, forked, and composed according to the agency of participants. For this reason, this thesis proposes a framework for open protocols in an effort to model a global human civilization on the stigmergic qualities of living systems protocols and the relational coherence of indigenous ones. The complexity and comprehensivity of the meta-crisis necessitates a complex adaptive system of interoperable and composable solutions that recenter the sovereignty of individuals and communities to directly address the challenges they face. The intended outcome of aligning innovators through a framework for open protocols modeled on living systems principles is nothing less than a stigmergic, self-organized process of cosmo-local adaptation and planetary learning process regarding protocolized local approaches to solving deeply entrenched challenges.