Team Member Names:
Deepening Interpersonal Connection Protocols for a Rapidly Complexifying World
As our local, global, and digital systems continue to complexity it is becoming increasingly difficult for any given individual to maintain a maximally efficient set of interfaces to all of the systems one must navigate in order to meet one’s needs or desires.
Traditionally people form collaborations within partnerships, family units, coworker groups, and friend groups to distribute interfacing with systems across individuals based on aptitude, status, interest, etc… The capacity of these collaborative relationships is largely determined by the depth of trust and shared perspective within the interpersonal connections that compose the collaborations. Meeting current and future societal challenges will require maximising the capacity of collaborative groups, which in turn will require maximising the depth of interpersonal connections.
Through lived experience we have developed an interpersonal connection protocol (ICP) that maximises trust and shared perspective between pairs and triads of individuals. We propose and initial short period of research and if necessary formalisation of traditional ICPs to provide contextual support for our primary goal of extending our ICP to support deeper connection and collaboration within increasingly larger groups of individuals.
What is the existing target protocol you are hoping to improve or enhance? Eg: hand-washing, traffic system, connector standards, carbon trading.
We hope to improve the broader protocol space of interpersonal connection by enhancing our specific ICP so that it can be scaled to larger and larger groups.
What is the core idea or insight about potential improvement you want to pursue?
We have developed a protocol that uses attunement, metacognition, emotional awareness, and formalised intention to efficiently achieve a maximum level of trust and shared perspective appropriate to a given interpersonal connection. This ICP supports the multiplexing of shared perspectives to provide greater parallax during collaborative inquiry, and affords greater space for the movement of emotional energy and the resolution of tension.
Most relevantly, our ICP appears to support individuals in feeling secure in relying on their collaborators in a deeper, more nuanced way that embodies more complexity than traditional ICPs.
What is your discovery methodology for investigating the current state of the target protocol? Eg: field observation, expert interviews, historical data analysis, failure event analysis
Situating our ICP within the traditional ICP context will require interviews with sociology and psychology subject matter experts and possibly some field observation.
Extending our ICP to accommodate larger groups will require discovery through workshopping with volunteer collaborators based on prototyped extensions to our ICP and failure analysis of those workshops.
In what form will you prototype your improvement idea? Eg: Code, reference design implementation, draft proposal shared with experts for feedback, A/B test of ideas with a test audience, prototype hardware, etc.
We will iteratively share draft protocol and contextualising documents with the above subject matter experts and interested individuals within the WeSpace and Liminal Web communities and request feedback while simultaneously workshopping prototype ideas with a “laboratory” of volunteer collaborators.
How will you field-test your improvement idea? Eg: run a restricted pilot at an event, simulation, workshop, etc.
We envision connecting with small to medium sized groups of existing collaborators to workshop using our extended ICP in real-world situations relevant to them.
Who will be able to judge the quality of your output? Ideally name a few suitable judges.
The quality of the extended ICP itself can be experientially verified by the field-test participants, however much of the value to this work is in the quality of the documentation and contextualisation of our protocol which will be better judged by the subject matter experts and interested individuals indicated above.
How will you publish and evangelize your improvement idea? Eg: Submit proposal to a standards body, publish open-source code, produce and release a software development kit etc.
We will create a discord server to house our research materials, drafts, proposed extensions to our ICP and discussion and feedback thereupon. We will connect with podcasters and videographers through our social connections in the WeSpace and Liminal Web communities to help spread awareness and interest in our work.
What is the success vision for your idea?
Our ultimate vision is a world in which partnerships, family units, coworker groups, friend groups, and ever larger collections of individuals are able to operate at a higher level of complexity because they can rely on more deeply supportive and nuanced interpersonal connections. Whether or not our ICP is the best next step to achieve this, we believe strongly that interpersonal connections must quickly evolve to operate at a higher complexity level if we are to meet the increasingly complex challenges our world is facing.