Jose Leal (with Scott Clearwater) presents Open Social Protocols, a framework built on Needs (recurring coordination conditions) around which communities publish, fork, and adopt Protocols rather than collapsing into single fixed agreements. He describes 'bridging protocols' that let multiple competing protocols for the same need coexist and interoperate, built atop the AT Protocol and a 'Common Ground' layer, citing examples like Morning Star Farms and Buurtzorg as organizations already operating this way without naming it 'protocol'.
0:12 All right. Uh, thank you everybody. This is our first time here. Scott and I have been working on this paper for a while.
0:20 I’m with Radical World and Open Social Protocols is what we’re working on. Um a little bit about me. I’ve been um I’ve started six businesses. Uh over the last decade, I’ve been working on the evolution of work, trying to understand how do we change the way we work. And it’s what led me to this work on on protocols um what we call open social protocols. And I want to tell you a little story of of some of the experiments that we’ve done over this decade [clears throat] uh through this story of of this uh three uh co-founders Maya, Leo, and Nure. Uh these this is sort of a a sample example of what often happens when you’re doing a startup. U like me, they have this passion for doing something different. They’ve all worked in existing organizations. uh but they want to do something that um they don’t see in the organizations that they’ve worked in. Uh they they have a lot of hope uh for doing something a little bit different.
1:33 Uh typically what happens in a startup scenario is you end up getting a whole bunch of uh advisers, consultants, people who know um exactly how to do the best way to to form an organization. Uh you’ve got the the lawyer with the boilerplate. this is how you structure the organization and [clears throat] the banker and the accountant and so forth. And what you end up with is a bunch of structures that um frame the organization and as an entrepreneur you think okay well this is what I have to do to start my business um and but I will we will end up doing the things we want to do. These structures are just uh temporary. Unfortunately, they’re not temporary. They end up um locking you in to a structure around uh what’s possible, what’s not possible. Um and you get locked in in a way that uh it makes it either difficult uh I think more likely impossible to actually change the way you organize in the future. And so my experience in the in our experiments has been um that there’s another way to do it and and the other way to do it is to actually focus on the needs and um have the founders go through the exercise of understanding what they need rather than getting answers from the experts.
3:03 start with the uh questions uh that they have themselves and the issues that they’ve encountered in their own experience uh and go through that process. And as we’ve gone through this process with some folks, what we’ve learned is that there is uh this propensity to to sort of lock things down and we go, okay, well, let’s align.
3:28 So, let’s agree on something. Yet what we’ve discovered is that the agreeing on something uh actually becomes problematic. Uh that the agreement or alignment actually causes uh people’s views and perspectives to get lost. And then once we’re already in that next threshold of agreement, uh anything that the insights that people were having are being um lost in the flow of what um of what they’re experiencing. And so the idea of uh open social protocols stems from the work around being able to propose a a question that we have and a possible uh solution and exploring that from different people’s perspectives. What do you think? What do you think? And instead of collapsing that into a single answer, uh allowing for multiple protocols to exist, for people to adopt different protocols um themselves and find out how to live with those different protocols.
4:46 The reason being that we believe that that the sense that people have around what is their reality is unique to them.
4:56 And if we collapse that into a single uh view of the world uh that that collapsing actually causes two things. One the loss of that perspective to the team uh because that individual’s perspective has now been knocked out. But also it uh reduces the ability uh for that individual to remain agentic if they’ve lost sight of uh their perspective. um everything else that is now going forward feels like it’s not part of what they can control or what they see. And so now they’re either um in you know engaged to a limit or disengaged from that process. And this work of of actually having these this clarity and building protocols um together um is a very interesting process of building the protocol and then when we find that there are two different uh or multiple different uh protocols for the same need um that instead of collapsing those we build a bridge a bridging protocol that creates the opportunity for um both or multiple um protocols to um coexist. Figuring out ways to um measure those uh the performance of those protocols, getting feedback from those protocols and maintaining the perspectives. So again, not collapsing but building that bridge which is another protocol on top of it that makes those two things interoperable. And that process of going through uh that bridging role actually provides for quite a bit of uh feedback opportunities. And so going through these cycles of feedback uh provides both the insight of the participants in the the disparate protocols but also the bridging process. Um and often what happens is that these protoc protocols do over time collapse into uh a smaller set of protocols often one uh but it takes time for uh people to get there and the perspectives of those individuals as they’re going through these cycles um actually change. So very often they’re very strong about I believe this is the right protocol and only to then say well yeah I see now why this isn’t maybe working and they’re the ones proposing changes rather than holding on very strongly to uh to something. Why? Because it they’re not being forced to collapse. So rather than holding on, they’re actually trying to figure out the problem, which is here’s my need. Here’s the the approach that I think is the right approach for that need. Uh but in doing so, they actually um uh give themselves the opportunity to keep trying to figure out the answer rather than pulling back.
8:22 And so these cycles of uh coming back and revisiting and revisiting and revisiting um provides for that engagement that agency that often is missing in uh the typical organization. So you’ve got the policy, you’ve got the the rule, you’ve got the the process that the organization has stipulated and you yourself are just a party to that. You’re not uh involved in those processes. So protocols provides for the idea that uh I can participate in these uh protocols and uh not only do I participate, we don’t set up a set of protocols at the beginning and they’re fixed for the the life of the organization, they’re ongoing developing living processes uh that we adjust, we identify new needs, we bring them to the table, we say okay well what are the protocols that everybody feels uh should be adopted. Uh individuals adopt their protocols very very often. What we find is that everybody adopts the same protocol. There’s a you know a range of protocols that people choose not to adopt the same one and then they go through this bridging process uh to discover uh what where we should go. And there are times where there’s a handful of protocols that are still over a period of time u months sometimes years those protocols uh remain bridged and that’s okay. There isn’t this problem of oh we don’t only have one single protocol for this for this situation.
10:10 But the bridging solves the issues solves the conflict. Um and which is interesting in itself because often um teams within organizations have their own groups of protocols and the bridging is happening between teams and so that’s okay because this team works better in this way and that other team works better in that other way and then the bridging protocol um works over that.
10:36 So what we see is that an organization like uh this uh that um these three folks create has the longevity. And what we found is that when people are engaged in the structure of their organization, not just the product or service that they offer, um that they’re actually uh much remain much more engaged uh in the organization and with their team rather than breaking up and becoming um quite often over time in in organizations they become uh combative. because of the reasons that I’ve just described about not being able to be um able to execute on what you perceive on what you’re thinking. So this work has led us to think that the way that we can express this in uh the modern technology is to not just do this in a manual way. Well, what if all of the work that this team does actually would uh be able to be extrapolated into a an ecosystem of protocols, open social protocols. I like to think of it as sort of the the Wikipedia of protocols. Imagine protocols uh to deal with different needs. needs are identified, sets of protocols are identified on top of that and those protocols anyone can generate uh add to the list of protocols for that need. Um any team can as this team did here go through the iteration process of evolving those protocols um forking them being able to to create new iterations and ultimately um that those sets of protocols are public uh they’re open like a Wikipedia they’re open source and uh the idea that uh the next team that says okay I know what my needs are. Uh they can grab that um set of protocols, those sets of needs that others have defined. They can um adjust them to their own context and um either use the protocols that are existing or iterate on those protocols or fork those protocols in order to uh to be able to meet their needs. So we believe this really rapidly accelerates a transition from the traditional way of working to a new way of working. a new way that maintains engagement, maintains um participation in the organization and that people who would traditionally just say I’m a worker and I’m I’m just here to do um you know the thing can actually start to be participating in the organization. We have examples of this throughout the world that these types of uh collaborative organizations are emerging. Um later this afternoon, Scott’s going to be presenting a little bit more uh about life fingerprint, which is one of the the things that uh we’ve developed here and uh he’ll talk about one of the organizations that we’ve studied uh birds. Um so let me show you a little bit here about what we’re building. Uh the at the foundation of what we’re building is um the ACT protocol. Most of you are probably familiar with you with it if you’re at all familiar with it uh through the blue sky product uh which is sort of the X competitor. Um what it brings to the table is the ability for these protocols to live in your own repository. Uh for you to have your own identity within that and for each protocol to have its own identity. It’s it’s it can only be versioned. It cannot be changed. Um and that technical foundation really provides for the ability for a um uh federated system uh that uh can grow uh hopefully from that uh basis.
15:14 The work that we’ve then did is on a common ground protocol and common ground protocol is uh two things. one um how do we take this kind of information because app protocol uh was designed initially for for posting stuff like Twitter tweets. Um how do we restructure this information to be able to do something um a little different? And uh so two things we build a um a set of shared observations. We tied them to what we call life space u which uh Scott will speak a little bit more uh about this afternoon. And we start to uh look at what are the the needs from a living perspective and the practical practical needs uh that uh arise in um our culture, our society and bring those into that framework in order to support both open social protocols and other types of um systems uh on top of that. So we see that open social protocols is is but one of the possible things that would u participate in the common ground ecosystem.
16:46 And uh on top of that is uh open social protocols which defines uh a reproducible set of um open uh both open spec and open uh code. um protocols around uh how do we do protocols, who gets access to them, how do they evolve, all of that kind of stuff within this context and they become um anyone can produce their own application from that. Uh SDKs and all of that are are being planned. Um and then we have um the uh our protocols which is going to uh be launched next month which is the reference application and our uh protocols will have uh the ability to um offer all of the services that I’ve described as far as the creation of these protocols and uh the ability to edit uh fork uh a do uh and uh look at groups and all that kind of stuff. So, I’m going to um switch over here if I can. I’m hopeful that this will work.
18:13 All right. Uh so what we have here is um development version of uh of um our protocols. And uh what we see is sample data from what we um showed there with the example of of Maya Leo and Mur and the types of uh protocols that they would use um which are both at the social level and can be at the technical level but also the grounding that is uh available uh through the common ground protocol and all of this work is based on uh our ability to uh maintain this distinctly owned by the individuals thanks to a protocol. So you publish it, it’s published through your own uh repository and then it makes it available to um for uh others to add to fork so on and so forth. And uh so this is the group here where you have a protocol field which allows you to see who’s adopted what and um where the decisions are as to how somebody may be uh choosing a different one, what the bridging protocols are and so forth so um work in progress. It’s just a mockup at this point. Uh but uh some of it some of this is is functional as you see. Uh but again we hope to launch next month and um I think that’s about it.
20:56 Yeah, I’d be curious like um yeah, what’s the what’s the team look like for doing something like this? I know that like protocol entrepreneurship is is kind of a strange thing to do and you know often often you don’t have like a big team. Um but yeah, I’d be curious just to get like a little bit of a rundown of like who’s involved like like how you thought about like finding um allies, institutional partners, that sort of thing. Just what’s your approach been?
21:25 Uh so it’s a distributed model at the moment. Uh we’ve been doing some of this research uh mostly in Europe, uh Brazil and Mexico um with different teams. um some here, some in um yeah, different places. Um and the as as far as the development team and the production team, it’s only about three four people uh that have been working on it. Uh but as far as sort of the participants and contributors, it’s uh it’s been a fairly large team over the years. Um so the the idea is to try to build the team for the development side and the deployment of of such a a protocol.
22:11 What’s um are the people working on it as contributors um like full-time part-time? What’s kind of part time? Yeah.
22:33 Absolutely. Absolutely. But I think we’re at the tipping point where this kind of stuff is uh not only going to become easier to do uh but uh really necessary. And we see that in the organizations that we’ve uh researched that are trying to figure out how to do this without the technology. Um and so they’re really everybody who’s trying to do something uh in this space is doing so um where they’re learning they’re they’re right back to ground zero every time. uh they don’t have anything to really or they’re modeling themselves on somebody else and which is kind of difficult to do as well. So
23:20 yeah, one one question in the chat um from Andre, this sounds promising. Has the system been tried with low margin work? Um that makes sense.
23:37 well, I’m thinking that your example probably takes high margin work. Like I have a great product idea that might make millions of dollars and then so it’s worth setting up these like protocols and having lots of conversations. Most of my life has been in the trades and construction. the idea that you would take your like carpenters and spend a afternoon talking about how the structure would work for them just like it just not done like it’s just not uh cost effective. So I just wondering like is this something that could potentially bring in the cleaners like most people rent an office their washrooms are clean but it’s never actually part of their internal systems. It’s always like the magical other thing that comes in. And is there a limit to adaptabil adaptability on that kind of scale?
24:31 Not that we’ve seen. One of the um organizations that we studied was um Morning Star Farms. They’re an organization that produces like something ridiculous, 80% of the world’s tomato paste or something like that. They happen to be here in California and they um have 2500 people on peak time.
24:55 Most of those people are processing tomatoes. So they’re running the equipment, they’re running the line. Um and they do this they do this with paper agreements at the moment. um these um they call them um not protocols but commitments and they work through these commitments with each other. Um and the cleaner, the person running the machine, the person maintaining the machine. But what you see is things like through this process, the person who maintains the machine is now given ownership of the machine. He doesn’t just maintain the machine. He’s the one that decides when the machine needs to be replaced. He’s the one that decides who needs to be working on it. A lot of decisions that are traditionally being done higher up have moved down through this process. So people, yes, it’s a little bit more ownorous. uh but people accept that level of responsibility because they get that level of autonomy uh that is is reciprocal to that. So it’s what we see is that uh we see examples in in Europe as well where factories uh automobile part factories are are run in similar ways. Uh uh Scott later this afternoon is going to be talking about Bertzark.
26:25 They’re the largest um nursing organization in all of the Netherlands. U something something like 15,000 nurses. Uh and they are run um in these groups that operate in very similar ways. Uh it’s not a top- down model. uh they’re the group is actually deciding what what the rules are locally. Um again they don’t use the term protocol but in principle that’s what they’re doing. They’re going through this process. Um they’ve are the number one they’ve been rated the number one company to work for in all of the Netherlands. So these are examples of organizations that are paying attention to how you organize not just what you do, not just the product, not just the service. And in paying attention to it and leaving that fluid, then you see the type of results that uh that we’re seeing from those 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.
Kaliya Young argues that hard technical protocols (like those governing the Linux kernel) depend on 'soft' relational protocols for trust, using the XZ backdoor incident—where a fabricated contributor nearly inserted malware—as proof that the failure was relational, not cryptographic. She traces digital identity through three generations (username/password, OAuth/OpenID, then DIDs/verifiable credentials) to a proposed third generation of 'digital trust graphs': peer-to-peer verifiable relationship credentials, verifiable membership credentials, and verifiable trust agents, developed through the Trust Over IP/Decentralized Trust Graph working group. Kevin Triplett discusses Project Weave's focus on adoption, emphasizing that groups—not individuals—should be the unit of reputation and AI alignment, and that these protocols can be applied locally, even to place-rooted neighborhood governance.
Amber Case presents the Calm Technology Institute's 81-point certification framework, arguing that human attention operates like a law of nature—distinguishing prefrontal-cortex-demanding 'center' attention from pass-through 'peripheral' attention—and that products (from car buttons to AI interfaces) should be designed and governed accordingly. She traces the framework's lineage to Mark Weiser's 1995 calm technology principles and discusses the legitimacy problem of building certification authority without statutory power, comparing CTI to Underwriter Laboratories and the Good Housekeeping Seal. The session closes with audience discussion, including Venkatesh Rao connecting the talk to Kairos/Chronos time and AI's 'staircase' temporality.