The core ideas in this essay were co-developed by the author and Patricia Parkinson. It also draws on the work of Nathan Schneider, Kaliya “Identity Woman” Young, Day Waterbury, Sheri Herndon, Exeunt, Vengist, Christina Bowen, Frank Sanborn, Michel Bauwens, Jeff Emmett, Magenta Ceiba, Ron Turetzky, Jessica Zartler, Darren Zal, Andrea Farias, Austin Wade Smith, Bill Baue, Jamaica Stevens, and Ferananda Ibarra.
“Climate change will appear on a small black rectangle a few inches from your face until it appears outside your own window.”
— paraphrased from @PerthshireMags
When Hurricane Helene tore through western North Carolina in the fall of 2024, most of us watched something through our phones that we are increasingly likely to experience in our own lifetimes. And yet, beyond the sheer horror and suffering we bore witness to on our screens, something even more troubling lurked in the background.
The gap between the scale of disaster we now face and the capacity of our institutions to respond has become a chasm. The scope of the ecological catastrophe, with entire communities buried under mudslides, infrastructure shattered, environmental toxins leaching into watersheds from ruptured industrial sites, vastly exceeds the coordinating capacity of any centralized agency. In the case of North Carolina, it was ordinary people, showing up for each other through informal networks and mutual aid, who actually kept their neighbors fed, sheltered, and alive.
Volunteers organized spreadsheets to track who needed what and where. Mule trains carried supplies into hollows that road crews couldn’t reach for weeks. Neighbors who had never spoken became lifelines. And when the initial surge of emergency response faded and the media moved on, it was these peer networks, not federal agencies, that sustained the long, unglamorous work of recovery.
This isn’t a story about government failure, exactly. It’s a story about what happens after institutions fail. The crises that are bearing down on us—climate-driven disasters, AI acceleration, supply chain fragility, institutional decay, economic dislocation, techno-authoritarian consolidation—are distributed, cascading, and intensifying. The systems we’ve built to respond are centralized, bureaucratic, and brittle. They were designed for a world of predictable emergencies within a stable civilization. That world no longer exists.
The question we should be asking is not how to make FEMA more efficient. The question is: how do we dramatically expand the capacity of ordinary people to coordinate effective responses to crises that will increasingly overwhelm every centralized institution?
I believe the answer lives in a word that is simultaneously ancient, modern, and just emerging: protocols.
What Is a Protocol?
The word “protocol” carries different connotations depending on who’s using it. In diplomacy, it refers to the formal rules governing state interactions. In computer science, it describes the standardized patterns that allow machines to communicate. In medicine, it’s a treatment sequence. In an indigenous context, protocol can often refer to relational practices or ceremonial processes that encode traditional ways of being and culturally held ethical systems. In each case, the core meaning is the same: a pattern of interaction that enables coordination without requiring a central authority to manage every exchange.
Nathan Schneider, in his ongoing work on what he calls “protocol ecologies,” offers a definition I find particularly useful: a protocol is any pattern of interaction among agents. What strikes me about this definition is its elegant compression. Viewed through the lens of information theory, a protocol might be one of the smallest packets of information we can transmit that connects to an entire universe of actual human experience and relationship. It is a way of doing something, compact enough to share, specific enough to be useful, flexible enough to adapt.
This definition becomes richer still when we explore indigenous uses of the term, a context I want to honor without pretending to fully represent. My understanding, from the outside as a student among primarily Lakota elders, on Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations and in various circles around the world, is that protocol, in many indigenous contexts, describes specific processes that establish, cultivate, and maintain right relationship. The patterns are not arbitrary conventions. They are the relational intelligence of cultures that have sustained themselves across generations, emerging from the evolutionary process of practicing reciprocal tending over time and across relational contexts.
One of the protocols I encountered on the reservation was disarmingly simple: before you ask for assistance, give a gift of tobacco. That’s it. A single relational instruction that establishes the field of mutuality in which a gifting exchange can even take place. No complex legal framework. No terms of service. Just a pattern of interaction that generates trust through its very enactment. Living the protocol creates the relationship where meaningful exchange occurs.
If that sounds simple, that’s the point. Simple patterns of interaction can shift the entire frame of exchange from extraction to reciprocity. Protocols create accountability without enforcement. They teach, through iterative and embodied practice, the disposition that makes cooperative life possible. And a protocol is infinitely portable. Any community, in any context, can adopt and adapt it.
This is what protocols do at their best. They encode relational intelligence into shareable, forkable, adaptable patterns.
The Digital Precedent
As a technological phenomenon, protocols are still fundamentally relational—they just describe relationships between machines. The most famous digital protocol in history offers a powerful illustration of what even a simple pattern of interaction can achieve at scale.
TCP/IP, the Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol, developed by the early architects of the internet, provided a pattern of interaction that formalized how all computer networks communicate. It defines how data is broken into packets, addressed, transmitted, received, and reassembled. The protocol itself is remarkably simple in its core logic: it specifies the pattern of interaction between two nodes in a network. It does not care what you send—email, video, financial transactions, love letters, or deep fake propaganda. It just ensures delivery.
And that simplicity is precisely what makes it so powerful. Because the protocol is opinionated about how information moves but agnostic about what information moves, it supports an almost inconceivable diversity of expression. The entire architecture of the modern internet—every website, every app, every streaming service, every encrypted message—rests on this single pattern of interaction between machines.
It’s important to note here the limitations of protocols. The near-infinite diversity they offer also comes with constraints. Protocols function as a kind of ontology or worldview. The kinds of interactions they support will be the interactions that occur when people interact with the protocol. In this way, protocol builders face some of the most critical ethical considerations of any technology builder. Protocol development must be collectively steered to ensure the protocols we rely on reflect the kinds of interactions we want to experience.
The blockchain protocols that undergird Ethereum and Bitcoin explore this logic further, providing a truly decentralized open protocol for the domains of value and coordination respectively. Ethereum doesn’t just move information; it enables programmable agreements between parties who don’t trust each other, executed on credibly neutral infrastructure that no single entity controls. The Ethereum protocol itself is open in that any developer can propose a change. While I have personally argued for more explicitly democratic protocol governance in the Ethereum ecosystem, the supposed openness of Ethereum’s protocol evolution still points towards the potential of truly open protocols that adapt and evolve through the participation and stewardship of the people who use it.
One of my favorite figures in the field of open protocolization is Kaliya Young “Identity Woman”, a fearless and visionary leader who has convened the Internet Identity Workshop for the last 20 years, using open space convening to align a diverse array of protocol developers around open identity standards that are used billions of times each day and provide a core infrastructure layer for the internet. Her research with Day Waterbury on the Remarkable Regenerative Patterns and Practices of the Internet Engineering Task Force has been foundational to my understanding of how commons governance methodologies can be applied to the development of protocols at scale.
Similarly, quadratic funding protocols like Gitcoin’s now-deprecated Allo protocol translate distributed community preferences into resource allocation without requiring a board or a committee to make the final call.
Each of these represents a pattern of interaction between agents, encoded in a way that can be adopted, adapted, and extended by anyone.
If digital protocols can enable coordination at planetary scale between machines that share no trust and no culture, what might we accomplish by applying the same design principles to the coordination challenges that matter most: the ones between actual human beings, in real communities, facing real crises?
Social DNA
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.
The Convergence
What makes this moment different from every prior era of community organizing is the convergence of several intellectual and practical traditions that, together, make the vision of shareable, forkable, evolvable social protocols not just possible but urgently necessary.
Nathan Schneider’s work on protocol ecologies, building on his earlier Governable Spaces and extending into new territory around what he’s called “a protocol society,” provides the theoretical scaffolding. Schneider, a media studies professor at the University of Colorado Boulder who has spent years studying how governance works (and fails) in digital communities, argues that every act of writing code is an act of regulation, every protocol a kind of law. His insight that protocols aren’t merely technical artifacts but governance instruments—patterns that distribute or concentrate power—is foundational for understanding why the design of social protocols is a political act.
Kaliya Identity Woman Young’s two decades of work building the open standards infrastructure for decentralized identity—from co-founding the Internet Identity Workshop to helping develop standards like OpenID Connect, OAuth, and the W3C’s Verifiable Credentials and Decentralized Identifiers specifications—demonstrates what it looks like when protocol development is approached as public infrastructure rather than corporate product. The identity protocols she has helped bring into existence allow people to prove claims about themselves without ceding control of their data to centralized platforms. This is not a minor technical achievement. It is a fundamental reorientation of the power dynamics embedded in digital interaction.
Gitcoin’s quadratic funding protocol shows what happens when coordination protocols are applied to the ancient problem of public goods funding. Gitcoin successfully adapted an insight about quadratic funding from Glen Weyl and Vitalik Buterin into a standalone protocol for public goods funding that weights contributions based on the number of contributors rather than the size of contributions, ensuring that broadly supported initiatives receive more resources than narrowly funded ones. Over seventy million dollars have been allocated through this mechanism, and the pattern it instantiates—democratic preference revelation without centralized decision-making—is itself a protocol that any community could adapt for its own resource allocation needs with or without a blockchain.
The Open Protocol Research Group and projects like Open Machine are pushing further into the design space of interoperable, composable protocols for human coordination, asking not just how individual protocols work but how ecologies of protocols can be designed to interact, reinforcing each other like the interlocking systems of a living ecosystem.
OpenCivics’ work on open protocol libraries as well as the development of a social organism ontology is an expression of our sincere attempts to help provide the needed infrastructure to unleash the evolutionary potential of open protocol development.
Bioregional knowledge commoning, a distributed effort being advanced by practitioners in Cascadia like Darren Zal for the Salish Sea and globally by Andrea Farias and Bill Baue, represents an opportunity to index the protocols of place developed throughout the bioregional movement thus far and into the future. Bioregional knowledge commons create a shared digital and social space for documenting the insights of the original bioregional organizers before their generation is no longer with us. Knowledge commons themselves require protocols to document, share, and govern pools of community knowledge. Their development requires socio-technical infrastructure that can support the pluralistic, nested, and grassroots protocols of bioregional organizing.
These threads are converging. And they are converging at exactly the moment when we need them most.
The Ethical Mandate
The uncomfortable truth that we must now face with unflinching honesty is this: existential crises are accelerating faster than our institutional capacity to respond. This is not a temporary condition. It is a structural reality of the world we now inhabit.
Climate disruption is intensifying. Each year brings more extreme weather events, more cascading infrastructure failures, more communities overwhelmed by disasters that exceed the design parameters of every emergency management system on Earth. At the same time, the institutions we have historically relied upon to coordinate collective responses—federal agencies, municipal governments, even large NGOs—are themselves under tremendous strain. Budgets are contracting. Public trust is eroding. Political polarization makes even basic coordination politically fraught. The social contract that once bound citizens to states through mutual obligation has been so thoroughly hollowed out that many communities have already learned, through bitter experience, that help is not coming.
The result is a widening gap, a chasm between the scale of coordination required and the capacity of existing systems to provide it. And into that gap, again and again, it is ordinary people who show up to care for one another. Mutual aid networks. Neighbor helping neighbor. Informal coordination emerging from the sheer necessity of survival.
But mutual aid has its own limitations. Volunteer networks burn out. Informal coordination breaks down as scale increases. The emotional labor of sustained crisis response, without institutional support, takes an enormous toll. The North Carolina experience made this vividly clear: mutual aid kept people alive, but the environmental toxins exposed by the flooding, the long-tail health consequences, the slow-motion ecological damage, extend far beyond what any informal network can sustain.
What we need is not a replacement for mutual aid but an amplification of it. We need to make it dramatically easier for communities to learn from each other, to share what works, to adapt proven patterns to new contexts, and to coordinate at scales that informal networks alone cannot achieve. We need open protocol libraries: living repositories of documented, shareable, forkable patterns of interaction that equip communities with the social DNA they need to organize effective responses to the crises that are coming.
This is not optional. This is not a nice-to-have. This is an ethical mandate.
If we know that centralized institutions will increasingly fail to meet the moment, a claim we can make with increasing certainty, then we have an obligation to invest in the distributed coordination infrastructure that can fill the gap. That means creating and curating protocols for disaster response. Protocols for mutual aid logistics. Protocols for establishing community communications infrastructure when centralized networks go down. Protocols for local economic coordination when supply chains fracture. Protocols for collective decision-making under conditions of stress and uncertainty.
Every one of these protocols can be documented. Every one can be shared. Every one can be forked and adapted to the specific cultural, ecological, and economic context of the communities that need them. And every time a community successfully adapts a protocol from another context, the library grows richer. The social DNA evolves. The collective capacity to respond expands.
Building the Library
What would it actually look like to build an open protocol library for community resilience?
OpenCivics Consortium Citizens and Stewards have been exploring this for the last two years, with various learnings and false starts along the way. While some technical, social, and governance hurdles persist, I believe we have no choice but to start where we are, build what we need, and share what we learn.
This process will be iterative but it starts with what already exists. The spreadsheets and organizational templates created by Tiffani Hart and Daniel Lindenberger that emerged from disaster relief in North Carolina, the mutual aid hub playbooks created by Scott Vineburg and Christopher Breedlove in Topanga Canyon during the Palisades Fires, the Occupy groups that evolved from protest to care work during Hurricane Sandy. The meeting facilitation methods refined by decades of community organizing, from Prosocial to Art of Hosting to Sociocracy to Open Space Technology. The resource allocation mechanisms being prototyped in Ethereum Localism communities. The identity verification practices that allow communities to establish trust without centralized gatekeepers. The conflict resolution protocols that enable diverse groups to navigate disagreement without fracturing.
All of these are protocols. All of them encode hard-won relational intelligence. And almost none of them are documented in a way that makes them easily discoverable, adaptable, and evolvable by other communities.
Frank Sanborn’s Social Fabric project represents one of the most concrete attempts to solve exactly this problem. Built on open-source decentralized infrastructure, Social Fabric is constructing a neighborhood-scale knowledge commons organized by domain: resilience, food systems, mesh networking, clean energy, local economy, governance, emergency preparedness, and water systems. Each domain hosts documented, community-maintained protocols, from seed swapping methodologies to mesh network configurations to collective governance frameworks. Underneath this commons sits a trust graph, a relational data layer that makes the accountability and connection between neighbors computationally legible without requiring a centralized authority to manage it. What makes Social Fabric significant in this context is that it treats the protocol library not as a standalone repository but as an integrated layer within living neighborhood infrastructure, one where the people documenting and forking protocols are the same people enacting them in their communities. This is what it looks like when the call for open protocol libraries stops being theoretical and starts becoming operational.
The architecture of these libraries itself needs to be protocolized, governed by open standards, forkable by design, and resistant to capture by any single organization. It would need to be, in Schneider’s language, a governable space, a commons with clear rules of participation that prevent enclosure while enabling contribution. It would need to support the kind of local adaptation that makes protocols actually useful, rather than imposing one-size-fits-all templates on irreducibly diverse communities.
And it would need to honor something that purely digital protocol design often misses: that social protocols are reproduced through relationships. A protocol documented in a repository is inert. It becomes alive only when people enact it together, when the pattern of interaction is embodied in the actual relationships of a community. The library is the seed bank. The community is the soil.
The Pattern Language
But seeds don’t organize themselves into ecosystems. Between the seed bank and a functioning biome lies the entire process of ecological succession: pollinators, mycorrhizal networks, seasonal rhythms, and above all, signaling systems that allow distributed organisms to coordinate without any central intelligence directing the process. An open protocol library, however well-architected, is inert without the social process that connects the people developing protocols, the communities enacting them, and the broader movement of practitioners learning from each other’s experiments.
That social process begins with something deceptively simple: paying attention. Every group you participate in is already running protocols, whether anyone has named them or not. The way your neighborhood association runs its meetings. The way your co-op allocates shifts. The way your mutual aid network decides who gets help first. The way your family navigates holiday logistics. These are all protocols. Most of them evolved informally, through trial and error, and most of them are invisible to the people enacting them.
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.
Projects like The Commoning Standard have begun to map these social protocols within a coherent meta-framework that connects various frameworks of social organizing. The Long Now Foundation has partnered with the newly established Protocol Institute to explore through their Labs how protocols can support civilizational continuity. Social coordination platform Hylo has contributed to and implemented the open Murmurations Protocol, another instance of an open social protocol. The Collaborative Technology Alliance has explored various distributed identity protocols to enable interoperability across social platforms. The Ethereum Foundation’s Verifiable Cities program is looking to fund the development of protocolized municipal services and civic infrastructure. Each of these developments points towards the emergence of a distributed protocol ecology for peer-to-peer self-organization and coordinated action. What’s missing is a coordinated effort to map these emerging open protocols within a library specifically designed to support community-led disaster resilience.
Without this coordination layer, we get a thousand brilliant protocols that cannot talk to each other. With it, we get protocol ecologies—interconnected, composable, and capable of supporting the kind of community sovereignty and self-organization that the crises ahead will demand.
Protocols of Place
Protocols of place are not protocols about place, as if geography were just a variable in the metadata. I mean protocols that are of place, that emerge from, respond to, and serve the specific ecological, cultural, and relational realities of communities rooted in particular bioregional contexts.
A watershed council needs protocols for water governance that reflect the hydrology of its specific basin. A coastal community needs disaster preparedness protocols that account for its particular exposure to storm surge and sea-level rise. An urban neighborhood needs mutual aid protocols that account for population density, linguistic diversity, and the specific vulnerabilities of its residents. These are not generic templates. They are living documents, adapted to the places where they are enacted, carrying the intelligence of the communities that have refined them through practice.
Despite their broad diversity and cultural construction, protocols can still be shared. The pattern of a water governance protocol can travel from one watershed to another, even as the specific parameters change. The structure of a disaster preparedness protocol can be forked from one coastal community to the next, adapted for different geographies and cultures. The social DNA travels. The expression remains relationally rooted in the ecological reality of place.
This is what distinguishes protocols of place from the protocols that mediate our interactions online. They exist at the intersection of shareable patterns and irreducible locality. The generic and the specific, held together. The universal grammar of coordination expressed in the local dialect of a community.
This is what I believe we have an ethical mandate to build. Not as an intellectual exercise but as an honest accounting of the reality of the climate crisis, a reality in which the crises that are coming will be responded to by people in real communities, a reality in which the protocols of place might be the difference between collective flourishing and extinction.
The alternative is not institutional rescue or reform. The alternative is chaos or authoritarianism, the slow fraying of social fabric that leaves everyone more vulnerable to either techno-fascism or Mad Max collapse.
We have the theoretical frameworks. We have digital infrastructure capable of supporting composable, interoperable protocol ecologies at planetary scale. What we lack is the political imagination and collective will to fund, catalyze, and cohere this work with the urgency it demands.
The protocols of place are waiting to be written, shared, and enacted. The best time to begin was yesterday. The second-best time is now.