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Bridge Atlas - Episode 3: Commons | Yancey Strickler & Trent Van Epps

Interview Trent Van Epps, Yancey Strickler
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Host Christine Kim talks with Trent Van Epps (Ethereum Foundation, Protocol Guild) and Yancey Strickler (Metalabel, Artist Corporations) about Ethereum and creative work as 'commons.' Van Epps explains Protocol Guild's legibility strategy of bundling 200 core developers to attract funding via mechanisms like the 1% pledge, while Strickler describes using label structures, revenue splits, and a proposed legal form (the Artist Corporation) to let creative groups share governance and money without full financialization.

Related resources

Talk

A Common Protocol for Composable, Modular Organizations

Simone Cicero of Boundaryless presents O2A (Open Organisation Alliance), a proposed open standard for making organizations 'composable' by replacing implicit coordination mechanisms like hierarchy and meetings with an explicit, machine-readable contract graph of units, offerings, and relationships. He argues the protocol's compact grammar—three economic primitives (purchase, revenue split, investment) plus composition mechanisms—can represent bespoke institutional arrangements like Haier's Rendanheyi model or joint ventures as 'sentences' in a common organizational language, becoming essential as AI agents enter firms and transaction costs collapse.

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Simone Cicero

Talk

Salon II: ARC Regenerative Communities - 2024 Protocol Symposium

Kaliya Young and 'day' present research into the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as a case study in regenerative governance, tracing its origins from the 1969 ARPANET through the 1992 governance crisis that shifted power from Vint Cerf's 'kitchen cabinet' IAB to open working groups organized around 'rough consensus and running code.' They map IETF practices—nomcom's randomized leadership selection, open RFC documentation, dispatch meetings, and ritualized in-person gatherings—onto three pattern languages (Group Works, Wise Democracy, and Social Permaculture) to argue that openness, transparency, and voluntariness are structural necessities, not limitations, for sustaining a healthy digital commons.

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Kaliya Young, day

Interview

Bridge Atlas - Episode 1: Intro | Tim Beiko & Timber Stinson-Schroff

In this launch episode of the Bridge Atlas series, host Christine Kim talks with Tim Beiko (Ethereum Foundation) and Timber Stinson-Schroff (Summer of Protocols project manager) about the origins of Summer of Protocols, which Beiko initiated with Venkatesh Rao to find a framework for understanding Ethereum beyond analogy, landing on 'protocols' and 'engineered arguments' as the unifying concept. They discuss key concepts developed over three years—like Nadia Asparouhova's Kafka index for evaluating protocols by their worst failure modes, and Whitehead advances describing how successful protocols disappear into the background—and explain that Bridge Atlas aims to connect Ethereum's protocol engineers with Summer of Protocols alumni from unrelated fields (coal mining safety, wildfire management) ahead of a culminating event at Devconnect.

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Tim Beiko, Timber Stinson-Schroff

Topics

artist-corporation-legal-structure bridge-atlas digital-commonsgovernance-of-shared-resources governance legibility-of-collective-contributors metalabel-revenue-splits-and-group-treasuries organizations protocol-guild-and-the-1-pledge protocols