Guest Talk with Janine Leger | Zuzalu: A First of Its Kind IRL Pop-up Community

Janine Leger, organizer of Zuzalu, presents the two-month pop-up community experiment in Montenegro (200 residents, 600+ visitors, funded largely by Vitalik Buterin) as a case study in deliberate community design, highlighting principles like proximity, kindness/curiosity as trust-building culture, decentralized social tech (zoopass, zuzalu.city scheduling), rituals, and local integration with Montenegrin officials. She draws explicit parallels to the Summer of Protocols cohort, urging the researchers to adopt similar practices—small core teams relying on broader groups, visitor rotation to avoid insularity, public 'dogfooding' of in-progress work, and rituals—to build a sustainable, collaborative research community.

Related resources

Talk

Guest Talk with Renee DiResta | A Troll's Guide to the Internet

Renee DiResta traces how 'trolling' evolved from a good-natured in-group initiation ritual on early BBS and blog communities into a weaponized tactic used by state actors like Russia, ISIS, Turkey's AKP, and Pakistani and Tanzanian operatives who exploit platform design gaps and policy loopholes (e.g., fake DMCA takedowns, mass-reporting gamification, hacked accounts) before platforms develop corresponding moderation protocols. She argues social platforms are designed for 'best case' use, creating a persistent gap between technological design affordances and reactive content-moderation policy, and discusses the historical collapse of the distinction between 'propaganda machine' (one-to-many broadcast) and 'rumor mill' (peer-to-peer salience-driven spread) in the social media era. She closes by weighing whether decentralized, federated protocols (Mastodon, Bluesky's AT Protocol) can offset this dynamic given they lack the large-scale moderation infrastructure of major platforms.</summary_truncated>

design-vs-policy-protocols-in-platform-moderation governance guest-talks

May 2023

Renee DiResta

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Guest Talk with Trent Van Epps | Capital and Enclosure in Software Commons: Linux & Ethereum

Trent Van Epps, researcher at the Ethereum Foundation and steward of Protocol Guild, presents a framework distinguishing capital and commons modes of production, then applies it to case studies of Linux (and Red Hat's gradual enclosure of CentOS) and Ethereum. He argues Ethereum is unique among software commons because it contains embedded capital circuits (proof-of-stake ETH, MEV, liquid staking) and produces a single globally-bound state object, raising the question of whether this containment stabilizes or dooms the commons to capture, and proposes Protocol Guild's unaffiliated funding model as a partial countermeasure.

anti-rival-and-symbiotic-goods commons-vs-capital-modes-of-production embedded-capital-circuits-in-ethereum-l1

Mar 2024

Trent Van Epps

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Guest Talk w/ Christina Dunbar-Hester | Directing Signals: Of Politics and Protocols

Christina Dunbar-Hester (USC, Science and Technology Studies) draws on her three books—Low Power to the People, Hacking Diversity, and Oil Beach—to examine protocols as 'terms of relating' that both open up new associations and enforce control, using Langdon Winner's framework that technologies encode order and politics. She traces this through 1990s-2000s pirate/low-power FM radio activism and community Wi-Fi ('cantennas'), gender exclusion and feminist server/code-of-conduct interventions in FLOSS communities, and the Port of Los Angeles/Long Beach as a site where standardized shipping protocols produce 'envirotechnical' dependencies and violence (pollution, whale strikes) hidden behind frictionless-flow imagery. She closes by distinguishing protocols (which create hard material/standardized handoff points) from merely 'culturally disciplining' practices like crypto-dancing or feminist server principles, and argues analysts must attend to both material and ideational levels of protocols, their recurring maintenance needs, and how local changes do or don't scale to systemic ones.

cultural-discipline-vs-hard-coded-protocol envirotechnical-infrastructure-and-maintenance feminist-servers-and-codes-of-conduct-in-floss-communities

Jun 2023

Christina Dunbar-Hester