Summer of Protocols: Retrofitting the Web

This is the home of my 2023 Summer of Protocols work product. I have structured it very close to how I typically deliver my work for clients, up to and including the Web-forward format. The basic elements are all here, though they are likely to shift around as I fill it out over the next several weeks.

The stated goals of the Summer of Protocols program are as follows:

To catalyze wide-ranging study of humanities/social science aspects of protocols

To increase public literacy and awareness around protocols

To broaden technical discourses beyond siloed protocol communities

To stimulate artistic and literary explorations of protocols

The goal of this program is to help accelerate and broaden the study of protocols by bringing together a diverse group for a summer of collaborative study, speculation, research, design, invention, and creative production around protocols.

Deliverables

My tasks over these eighteen weeks, as a core researcher, are, in addition to participating in the discussions and supporting my peers, are to create one protocol artifact, and one piece of writing about protocols.

`Intertwingler`, An Engine for Dense Hypermedia

One main target of these eighteen weeks is to create a piece of software that can be downloaded and installed on an ordinary computer (Mac and Linux, with Windows as a stretch goal), or run on a server or serverless environment. The software will primarily manifest as a library, with a command-line interface (and an interactive shell as a stretch goal). It will be able to be used as a static website generator (analogous to something like Jekyll, 11ty), or run as a live daemon in a zone that would normally be occupied by an MVC framework, plus something (like a CMS) running on top of it.

The protocol connection, here, in the narrow sense, is that this software is intended to be a reference implementation of a set of strategies and tactics for retrofitting the Web with capabilities that were present in earlier hypermedia systems that were effectively lost and/or forgotten in its ascension.

The broader connection is that I believe a piece of infrastructure such as the one proposed can provide a substrate for a certain category of dense hypermedia resources, tools and applications, with the characteristic that their instance data is fully (ex)portable.

To go even broader still, we can talk about why it's so important to be able to separate the data from the software, but we can save that for the rationale.

How this goal will be accomplished in eighteen weeks is that it is already very far along. It was something I was planning on doing in 2023 anyway, and took a speculative risk pitching it to the organizers.

Motivation & Rationale

Why we're doing it and why we're doing it the way we're doing it. This is the main work product aside from the protocol artifact, which is the engine.

Architectural Principles

For the technical audience, I have consolidated a set of five architectural principles that underpin this project.

Implementation Guide

The implementation guide will articulate how to install, configure, extend, and port Intertwingler.

Issue Network

This is the raw IBIS network of issues, positions, and arguments that underpin the project. It is currently implemented using App::IBIS, but will eventually be replaced (and repatriated to this site) by the Swiss Army Knife.

Activity

The activity channel has to do with matters of time.

Project Plan

How we're going to do it. Consider these more like the general sense or direction of activities, rather than discrete steps:

Create an engine,
Rough in some tools,
Do outreach,
Write it up.

Technical Notes

Project Journal

This is an at-least-weekly log of activities on the project.

Working in Public

I intend to maintain a presence on the Summer of Protocols Discord server throughout the course of the project, as well as put out sporadic updates on my main newsletter. I am also active on various social networks:

If you end up following me on any of those because of this project, please say so.

I often stream work that isn't too cognitively taxing and I can chat or do exposition while I'm doing it (since it's not very interesting to watch somebody just silently sitting and thinking).

Reference Catalogue

The reference catalogue is intended to be a write-once, accumulating container of existing materials that are used over the course of the project.

Bibliography

Books, articles, and other documents cited or otherwise contributed directly to this project. Expect this to grow incrementally as I plumb my memory in advance of any writing, then in big chunks when I actually start aggressively putting the proverbial pen to paper.

Dependency Manifest

This section will catalogue the resources that I have created, that contribute substantively to the protocol artifact. Many of these are things I have already completed or at least started on. I plan to demarcate the works that are entirely new as of this project.

SoP Glossary & Index

This is (will be) a generated list of terms and concepts used in this space, and where they were referenced. Chief among them is a working definition of protocol.

Archived Documents

This is a space for documents that have been created during the process that are no longer germane, yet are being kept for archival purposes.

Initial Pitch Document

This is the original document that I sent as part of my application, which argued the case to fund this project.

Colophon

This sitelet (and greater website) was made using the engine that will ultimately become the protocol artifact. This colophon will explain how I do it.