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. The plan below is where we start, and the people who come shape where it goes.

Next session Monday 2 November · 15:30 UTC

The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead OpenAI, 2026 · Kickoff

Register How sessions work

Reading plan

This is where the year starts, not a fixed curriculum. Readings, guests and even themes change as participants bring in what they’re reading, building and noticing. Suggest or challenge a reading, offer a talk, or bring a question to a session.

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 · Guests: Formal Protocol Theory SIG, Will Binns

   Readings and sessions

   1. 2 Nov 2026The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead OpenAI, 2026Kickoff how the year runs, and choosing your case
   2. 16 Nov 2026Patterns and problems in multiagent systems Anthropic, 2026Research group guest Formal Protocol Theory SIG: Stigmergic AI Safety
   3. 30 Nov 2026Model Context Protocol Specification modelcontextprotocol.io, 2024–Guest speaker Will Binns: Mru, a fault-tolerant operating system for thousand-year autonomous operation
   4. 14 Dec 2026Ironies of Automation Bainbridge, 1983Case pitches one paragraph each
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 and sessions

   1. 11 Jan 2027Quorum Sensing in Bacteria Miller & Bassler, 2001Research group guest Distributed Robotics Group: Decentralized Robot Markets
   2. 25 Jan 2027Robustness in bacterial chemotaxis Alon, Surette, Barkai & Leibler, Nature, 1999Tooling demo hardness tech and swarm orchestration infrastructure
   3. 8 Feb 2027Reverse Engineering of Biological Complexity Csete & Doyle, Science, 2002Open guest slot offer a talk
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 and sessions

   1. 22 Feb 2027The Filing Cabinet Robertson, 2021Tooling demo hardness tech and swarm orchestration infrastructure
   2. 8 Mar 2027The Log: What every software engineer should know about real-time data’s unifying abstraction Kreps, 2013Research group guest Memory Research Group: Organizational Memory Architecture
   3. 22 Mar 2027Contracts: Events Solidity documentationOpen guest slot offer a talk
   4. 5 Apr 2027Aviation Safety Reporting System: program summary NASA Ames for the FAA; established April 1976Tooling demo hardness tech and swarm orchestration infrastructure
   5. 19 Apr 2027Form 8-K: General Instructions U.S. Securities and Exchange CommissionOpen guest slot offer a talk
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 and sessions

   1. 3 May 2027Report of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island October 1979, "Attitudes and Practices"Case study catch-up member work
   2. 17 May 2027An Investigation of the Therac-25 Accidents Leveson & Turner, IEEE Computer 26(7), 1993Research group guest Personhood Research Group: Personhood Transformations
   3. 31 May 2027Final Report on the accident on 1st June 2009 to the Airbus A330-203, flight AF 447 BEA, 2012Tooling demo hardness tech and swarm orchestration infrastructure
   4. 14 Jun 2027Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report, Volume One Columbia Accident Investigation Board, 2003Case study catch-up member work
   5. 28 Jun 2027Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure Google SRE book, ch. 15Open guest slot offer a talk
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 and sessions

   1. 12 Jul 2027End-to-End Arguments in System Design Saltzer, Reed & Clark, ACM TOCS 2(4), 1984Case study catch-up member work
   2. 26 Jul 2027Summary of the Amazon S3 Service Disruption in the Northern Virginia (US-EAST-1) Region Amazon Web Services, 2017Tooling demo hardness tech and swarm orchestration infrastructure
   3. 9 Aug 2027External Technical Root Cause Analysis: Channel File 291 CrowdStrike, 2024Case study catch-up member work
   4. 23 Aug 2027In the Matter of Knight Capital Americas LLC (SEC order) U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, 2013Tooling demo hardness tech and swarm orchestration infrastructure
   5. 6 Sep 2027WHO Surgical Safety Checklist WHO: https://www.who.int/teams/integrated-health-services/patient-safety/research/safe-surgery/tool-and-resourcesResearch group guest Protocol Fiction SIG: Protocol Futurism
   6. 20 Sep 2027Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) Google Cloud, 16 Sep 2025Case study catch-up member work
6. 

   VI.Operational liveness

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

   3 sessions · Guest: Psychohistory SIG

   Readings and sessions

   1. 4 Oct 2027Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate Hammer, 1990
      Alongside: Toyota Production System, Toyota Motor CorporationGuest speaker Timber Stinson-Schroff: Cognitive Ergonomics project update
   2. 18 Oct 202714 CFR Part 5, Safety Management Systems FAA, 2015, expanded 2024Research group guest Psychohistory SIG: Prophecy Protocols
   3. 1 Nov 2027On Consensus and Humming in the IETF (RFC 7282) P. Resnick, June 2014Thesis session drafting the AI-native, post-platform organization

Explore every reading on the map

How sessions work

• When

  Every other Monday, 15:30–16:30 UTC, from 2 November 2026, with a break over New Year. The 2 November kickoff runs two hours, until 17:30 UTC. 16:30 Berlin, 10:30 New York, 7:30 San Francisco in winter; an hour later locally from late March.

• Where

  Protocol Institute Discord, #protocols-for-business

• Calendar

  Add the Protocol Institute calendar

• Recorded

  Yes. Recordings go in the archive.

• Your part

  The group shapes the sessions. Bring a reading, a question, a protocol you’ve noticed or a tool you’re trying, and the plan grows with it. First time? Just come and listen.

• Contact

  Rafael Fernández, @rafa_0x on Discord

What happens in a session

1. Guest speaker, when one is scheduled. Guests always go first.
2. Silent reading of the core text or an excerpt.
3. Round-robin on the reading: one reaction from each person.
4. Show-and-tell: hardness tech or swarm orchestration infrastructure, a member’s case study, or another research group’s work.

Want to be a guest? See speak at a session.

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.

Copy the prompt

I’m part of the Protocols for Business research group 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://protocolsforbusiness.com/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.