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Exit to Protocol

Paper Shuya Gong

Exit to Protocol examines how protocols can facilitate graceful retirement and archival by drawing parallels to narrative closure in television, specifically how platforms and communities can transition from active operation to preserved legacy. Gong argues for a framework where protocols enable individuals and organizations to exit with dignity while preserving their work and knowledge for future reference.

Related resources

Framework

Fire Protocols: Case File

Fire Protocols reframes fire from a destructive force to be suppressed into an essential ecological tool by developing community-based protocols for fire knowledge transmission and large-scale coordinated action across social, political, and ecological systems in Sonoma County. The framework positions attention as an autopoietic space that allows communities to regenerate and maintain fire knowledge while resolving tensions between geopolitical top-down structures and cultural knowledge systems.

climate community governance

Nathalia Scherer, Jiordi Rosales

Paper

Dispatches from Cascadia

This paper uses Cascadia as a speculative case study to explore how bioregional governance frameworks might organize communities around ecological rather than political boundaries, with bears and watershed patterns replacing state/provincial lines. Rajamohan examines how protocol-based systems could coordinate resource management and social infrastructure across overlapping ecoregions facing polycrisis challenges like climate instability and housing crises.

community fiction governance

Rithikha Rajamohan

Paper

Good Death

Sarah Friend argues that protocols can generate living worlds through accumulated user attention and interaction, and that a protocol's 'death' depends on whether it successfully cultivated such a world ecosystem rather than merely existing as a technical system. Drawing on gaming communities' definitions of when an MMO becomes 'dead,' she explores how platforms, places, and social systems generate worlds that persist or perish independent of their underlying protocol's technical status.

community governance protocol-watching

Sarah Friend