Beyond Consensus - Protocols as Digital Institutions - Martin Harrigan

Martin Harrigan, a lecturer and teaching fellow at SETU in Ireland, presents a method for using LLMs to study protocols: first building an LLM context file by transcribing and clustering ideas from the entire Summer of Protocols YouTube channel, then using that context plus a 10-property framework from 'The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols' to roleplay protocols (like his 'Kevin the dinner host' example) and test properties such as defensibility, mortality, and legitimacy. He walks through building prompts, meta-prompting, and steering LLM conversations to demonstrate these properties, while noting weaknesses like circular reasoning and the difficulty of generalizing from a single instantiation.

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Beyond Consensus: Protocols as Digital Institutions

Martin Harrahan (a teaching fellow at Southeast Technological University in Ireland) presents a protocol school workshop demonstrating an LLM-powered pipeline that transcribes and clusters the Summer of Protocols YouTube corpus into 'foundational' and 'aggregated' ideas, which can then be loaded as context to get chatbots to answer in protocol-studies terms rather than narrow computer-science definitions. He then walks participants through using an LLM persona ('Kevin the dinner host') to roleplay a chosen protocol and test it against the ten properties from Josh Stark's 'Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols' framework (e.g. defensibility, mortality, hardness), showing how conversational steering can reveal whether a protocol resists capture or can gracefully die out.

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