Guest Talk with Jay Graber | Q&A Hosted by Venkatesh Rao

Jay Graber (CEO) and Daniel Holmgren (Protocol Lead) of Bluesky discuss building the AT Protocol as a 'hybrid' alternative to both maximalist peer-to-peer decentralization and traditional centralized platforms, emphasizing that decentralization is 'a function of administrative control, not network topology' (quoting advisor Martin Kleppmann). They explain concepts like self-certifying repositories (DIDs, PDS), stackable/composable moderation as 'building blocks' rather than monolithic trust-and-safety, and contrast their 'schematic web' schema approach (Lexicon) with RDF/semantic web ontologies, arguing protocol entrepreneurship requires balancing fast app iteration with slow, methodical protocol design.

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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.

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Mar 2026

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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

Sep 2026

Simone Cicero

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Guest Talk with Daniel Bashir | A Survey of AI for the Protocol-Minded

Daniel Bashir, ML engineer at AWS and host of The Gradient podcast, surveys how protocol thinking applies across AI—from funding and scaling laws (like DeepMind's Chinchilla compute-optimal training protocol) to benchmarks (perplexity vs. François Chollet's ARC benchmark for measuring sample-efficient generalization) to regulation (the EU AI Act's risk-tiered categorization). He argues that nearly every layer of AI development—research, engineering, deployment, and governance—can be reframed as a set of competing or evolving protocols, using examples like Sarah Hooker's 'hardware lottery' and Tolga Bolukbasi-style debates over fair/responsible AI operationalization.

benchmarks-as-protocols-perplexity-arc-vibe-based-evaluation chollets-formal-definition-of-intelligence-and-generalization-hierarchy eu-ai-act-risk-based-regulatory-tiers

May 2024

Daniel Bashir