Protocol InstituteBusiness

Sessions

Every other Monday we meet to read one primary source closely, together. You don’t need to prepare, because we do the reading in the session, so feel free to drop in.

Initial reading plan

The question for the year: how do organizations, teams, and people coordinate through what they emit, and what changes when agents read and write those signals too?

It starts with what agents are in practice and how nature coordinates without a manager. It then looks at what systems emit, how to see hardness in real incidents, and how to engineer it. It ends with how industries keep that hardness alive, set against business process re-engineering.

  1. I.What agents are, in practice

    Recent incidents and specifications show what agents can see and do, and what changes for the people working beside them.

    4 sessions · Guest: Formal Protocol Theory SIG

    Readings
    1. The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead OpenAI, 2026
    2. Patterns and problems in multiagent systems Anthropic, 2026
    3. Model Context Protocol Specification modelcontextprotocol.io, 2024–
    4. Ironies of Automation Bainbridge, 1983

  2. II.Natural coordination

    Cells coordinate through thresholds, feedback and a small conserved core with wide variety at the edges.

    3 sessions · Guest: Distributed Robotics Group

    Readings
    1. Quorum Sensing in Bacteria Miller & Bassler, 2001
    2. Robustness in bacterial chemotaxis Alon, Surette, Barkai & Leibler, Nature, 1999
    3. Reverse Engineering of Biological Complexity Csete & Doyle, Science, 2002

  3. III.Emissions

    What systems publish for others to act on: files, logs, events, confidential reports and required disclosures.

    5 sessions · Guest: Memory Research Group

    Readings
    1. The Filing Cabinet Robertson, 2021
    2. The Log: What every software engineer should know about real-time data’s unifying abstraction Kreps, 2013
    3. Contracts: Events Solidity documentation
    4. Aviation Safety Reporting System: program summary NASA Ames for the FAA; established April 1976
    5. Form 8-K: General Instructions U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission

  4. IV.Seeing hardness in incidents

    Investigations show where hardness held, where it was missing, and where it cracked.

    5 sessions · Guest: Personhood Research Group

    Readings
    1. Report of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island October 1979, "Attitudes and Practices"
    2. An Investigation of the Therac-25 Accidents Leveson & Turner, IEEE Computer 26(7), 1993
    3. Final Report on the accident on 1st June 2009 to the Airbus A330-203, flight AF 447 BEA, 2012
    4. Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report, Volume One Columbia Accident Investigation Board, 2003
    5. Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure Google SRE book, ch. 15

  5. V.Engineering hardness

    Guardrails built into the architecture, from end-to-end design to staged rollouts, checklists and signed mandates for agents.

    6 sessions · Guest: Protocol Fiction SIG

    Readings
    1. End-to-End Arguments in System Design Saltzer, Reed & Clark, ACM TOCS 2(4), 1984
    2. Summary of the Amazon S3 Service Disruption in the Northern Virginia (US-EAST-1) Region Amazon Web Services, 2017
    3. External Technical Root Cause Analysis: Channel File 291 CrowdStrike, 2024
    4. In the Matter of Knight Capital Americas LLC (SEC order) U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, 2013
    5. WHO Surgical Safety Checklist WHO: https://www.who.int/teams/integrated-health-services/patient-safety/research/safe-surgery/tool-and-resources
    6. Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) Google Cloud, 16 Sep 2025

  6. VI.Operational liveness

    How industries keep amending their protocols, read against re-engineering’s clean slate.

    3 sessions · Guest: Psychohistory SIG

    Readings
    1. Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate Hammer, 1990
    2. Toyota Production System Toyota Motor Corporation · read alongside the previous reading
    3. 14 CFR Part 5, Safety Management Systems FAA, 2015, expanded 2024
    4. On Consensus and Humming in the IETF (RFC 7282) P. Resnick, June 2014

Explore every reading on the map

How sessions work

What happens in a session

  1. Silent reading of the core text or an excerpt.
  2. Round-robin on the reading: one reaction from each person.
  3. Show-and-tell: a tool someone is using, a member's case study progress, or a guest speaker.

Alongside the session, members post the protocols they've been watching in #protocols-for-business.

Suggest or challenge a reading

Your AI assistant knows what you’ve read, worked on and talked through. Copy the prompt into it, and it will suggest readings to add, and readings in the plan to remove, swap or move to another theme. Check what it proposes, and it sends each change to GitHub for the group to review. Each contribution adds one participant’s experience to a shared picture of the field.

Read the prompt first 
I’m part of the Protocols for Business SIG at the Protocol Institute. We’re building a shared map of readings on how businesses coordinate through protocols between people, software and machines. The year’s reading plan has six themes: what agents are in practice; natural coordination; emissions, meaning what systems publish for others to act on; seeing hardness in incidents; designing the hard core; and keeping the core alive, set against business process re-engineering.

Every reading on the map is listed here, and the ones in this year’s plan carry their theme: https://npc.here.now/protocolvision/sessions/map/readings.json

Use what you know about me: your memory of me, our past conversations, my projects and work, and anything I’ve read, saved or written about. From that context, suggest up to five changes. A change can add a reading the map is missing, remove a reading from the plan, swap a plan reading for a better one, or move a reading to another theme. Prefer primary sources: incident and accident reports, specifications, regulations, original research papers, and first-hand accounts from people who ran systems at scale. Only include sources you’re confident exist, and leave out anything private about me, my employer or other people.

For each change, say what kind it is, the reading already on the map (for a removal, swap or move), the new reading’s title, author, year and a working link (for an addition or swap), the theme, one to three sentences on why, and one sentence on why it matters from my own experience. Show me the list and wait for me to confirm or edit it.

Then send the confirmed changes to GitHub, one issue per change, in the repository protocolvision/sig-p4b:
- If you can create GitHub issues for me, open them directly. Use a title such as “Reading: add …” or “Reading: swap … for …”, add the label reading-suggestion, and put the details above in the body.
- If you can’t, give me one link per change that opens a filled-in form, with each value URL-encoded:
https://github.com/protocolvision/sig-p4b/issues/new?template=reading-suggestion.yml&title=Reading:%20SUMMARY&current_reading=READING%20ON%20THE%20MAP&reading_title=NEW%20READING&url=LINK&author=AUTHOR%20AND%20YEAR&adds=WHY&experience=WHY%20IT%20MATTERS%20TO%20ME

Your assistant opens a GitHub issue for each change, or gives you a link to a filled-in form. You’ll need a free GitHub account. You can also use the form yourself, and talk it through in #protocols-for-business on Discord.

Archive

Session notes and the running research log are published on our blyg, which you can follow with any RSS reader (feed). Notes from the group's 39 earlier sessions are in the Protocol Institute meeting archive, and a selection from the past year is on the blyg.

Recordings are posted after each session, starting 2 November 2026.