Hi SoP friends! Longtime lurker, occasional poster here. I’m a huge fan of all that’s coming out of this space, and consider myself a fellow traveler. For the past year or so I’ve been charting out a potential book on protocols, inspired in part by the ongoing conversations here. In Summer '23’s Discord, I posted a lot of my early sketches of #protocol-fictions that might wind up there.
But what brings me to write now is that I’m thinking of building an oral history archive on protocol stewardship—interviews with builders, maintainers, and reformers of diverse protocols, both digital and analog. I’d especially like to make sure to have as global a reach as possible.
I’m curious: Who would you like to see included in such an oral history? (I plan to approach some of you here already!) And what would you like to see them be asked?
Secondly, Would you be interested in helping to build such an oral history archive? If folks are interested, we could set it up as a kind of permissionless protocol so that people can contribute.
Awesome to hear. We’re pulling together a virtual protocol symposium with an unconference component in a couple of weeks. Maybe your book project might spark a suitable session idea?
Thanks—I’d love to participate. I could think of a few possible points of focus:
capture. I co-led a session on protocol capture at Edge, which lots of SoP people participated in. I’d love to share some of the thinking I’ve been doing based on that conversation, which feeds into a theoretical paper I’ll share here soon
oral history. If useful I could do a session on crafting the protocol for an oral history on protocols. I’d LOVE feedback.
#protocol-fiction, reviewing that practice, which seems to have been woven into
Founded UserLand Software, a company involved on the development of XML-based protocols (XML-RPC, SOAP, RSS, OPML). He also pioneered the podcast stuff, is very active in their blog and is usually very eager to talk about the history of technology.
Links: