Protocols for the Long Now

ArticleDenise Hearn, Timber Stinson-SchroffMay 5, 2026

The Protocol Institute launches its first official collaboration with the Long Now Foundation through three participatory cross-disciplinary labs exploring how protocols enable civilizational durability, asking which protocols allow civilization to grow while managing tensions and how information technologies integrate after disruption. Applications are due June 5, with the initiative framed as an open-ended investigation rather than an attempt at historical prediction or a prescriptive checklist.

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organizations protocols

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Talk

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.

Simone Cicero

Talk

Group Brains: Minds Made of People

Kaliya Young presents her Protocol Institute-funded research on the IETF as a 'group brain' — a durable collective cognition combining a memory substrate (the data tracker, RFC series, mailing lists) with a human 'knowing' culture (rough consensus, birds-of-a-feather sessions, sortition-based leader selection) that together produce capacities no individual member holds. She extends the framework to Wikipedia and DAOs as comparative cases, introduces the concept of a 'group membrane' (who's in/out and how boundaries harden toward power), and argues AI should augment rather than replace human group cognition, positioning group-level alignment as a missing middle between individual and humanity-wide AI alignment debates.

Kaliya Young

Talk

Governance Axioms

Eric Alston presents a framework of five recurring 'governance axioms' for protocol design—incomplete rules, governance-as-conflict, mechanical concentration of authority, asymmetric incentives from shared resources, and the transparency-privacy tradeoff—arguing these tensions can never be designed away, only managed through mechanisms like killswitches, veto-gates, and tiered amendment rules. Drawing on his experience advising Cardano's constitution, DAOs, and peace processes, Alston contends that 'incomplete rules' mean norms and discretion inevitably fill gaps left by any formally encoded protocol, and that durable systems require 'dynamic fidelity'—credible commitments combined with constrained capacity for adaptation rather than either permanent rigidity or unchecked flux.

Eric Alston