2025 Protocol Symposium

Come help Accelerate Order! Applications Close August 22

We are excited to announce the second annual Protocol Symposium, the flagship annual event of the Summer of Protocols program. The theme of the symposium is the same as this year’s program: Accelerating Order: exploring protocols as an emerging new world logic, through education, research, and scene-making activities.

This year’s online symposium will comprise an in-person Protocol Foundations workshop from Sept 12-14 (Fri-Sun), aimed at mathematically oriented researchers and practitioners, followed by a weeklong Protocol School from Sept 15-19 (Mon-Fri), aimed at those interested in acquiring a basic grounding in protocol studies, from any background.

Both events are free, but invite-only, and attendance is capped for both. Applications for both are now open, and you can apply to either or both below. Applications are due by Aug 22, and we will send out invitations by Aug 29.

The Foundations workshop aims to seed a multidisciplinary research track towards a formal theory of protocols, and is suitable for mathematically oriented researchers and practitioners interested in contributing to building the foundations of this emerging field through formalization, unification, and codification efforts. Attendance will be limited to 30 participants.

The Protocol School aims to provide an rigorous introduction to protocol studies, at roughly college level, taught by the 2025 teaching fellows, seasoned educators who are working through the summer to develop a variety of protocol-themed courses for their home institutions. The School will comprise 12 intensive short courses based on their work. It is suitable for all participants, and no particular background is necessary, though some technological background will be helpful. Attendance will be limited to 50 participants. A certification will be provided to participants who meet requirements.

Alongside these two events, we will be curating guided coworking sessions for those who wish to incubate, or work on, a protocol-related personal or work project alongside participation in the symposium.

For more information please check the application page.

Preparing to Attend

If you are new to this program and community, we have many resources available that will help you get the most out of the symposium. We recommend spending some time familiarizing yourself with them.

We recommend the Protocol Reader (available as a free ebook, and the recommended basic text for the School) as an entry point. For those interested in field knowledge and practitioner wisdom, the Field Guide, should be helpful. Videos from last year’s Symposium (which was focused on case studies and field applications) can be found on our YouTube channel, alongside dozens of other videos on various aspects of protocols. New videos from our Protocol Town Hall series are posted roughly weekly.

If you are considering applying to the Symposium, we highly encourage you to join our Discord to get a taste for the conversations that you might have at either the Foundations Workshop or Protocol School. You can tune in to one of the Special Interest Group (SIG) calls on memory, technical foundations, or tensions and protocol design. A schedule for these calls is available here and on Discord.

Hope to see you at the Symposium!