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Mechanical Currents

Article Timber Stinson-Schroff
researcher practitioner
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This issue explores AI adoption in businesses through the lens of protocol studies, examining how protocols constrain and coordinate infrastructure while AI systems generate and transform knowledge at massive scale. The Special Interest Group on Protocols for Business investigates the tensions between AI diffusion (700+ million weekly users of OpenAI tools) and organizational security, focusing on how employees use LLMs with sensitive business data.

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Article

A Government Guide to Open Protocols

Public sector institutions can escape the false choice between proprietary vendor dependency and expensive in-house development by adopting open protocols, which distribute control across multiple actors and allow governments to understand, participate in, and adapt their digital infrastructure. European governments are increasingly implementing open protocols for messaging, digital ID, and cross-border services as a way to achieve digital sovereignty while reducing both software costs and geopolitical exposure.

article governance protocols

Kelly Roegies

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.

company-world-model-for-agentic-coordination composable-organization contract-graph-common-alphabet-of-units-and-offerings

Simone Cicero

Article

A Sea of Distributed Ai

This issue features worldbuilding analysis of the AI-generated film South Beast Asia, examining ten core traits designed to explore distributed AI systems through a Southeast Asian-inspired lens developed at the Khlongs & Subaks workshop. The piece unpacks how fictional 'strange rules' address questions of AI distribution while the issue also hosts a guest talk with AI Snake Oil author Arvind Sarayanan.

AI article fiction

Sam Chua

Topics

article organizations protocols technology