@Kara Kittel @Toby Shorin
Our SoP Discord handles: @kara0038, @telos0360
Project Outline
Can new intellectual fields be founded by online communities? What makes an internet-based intellectual program, such as Summer of Protocols, successful? Certainly intellectual spaces exist online. Their distributed mode of collaboration recall the great Republiic of Letters of the 17th and 18th century, but the internet has yet to engender communities of scientific and intellectual inquiry that rival legacy knowledge institutions. Why?
To answer this question, we are examining the modes of intellectual life that animate historical and present intellectual institutions. Through this inquiry, we identify what we call a “credit culture”: a set of protocols that define a community of knowledge over space and time. As this term of art suggests, we are interested in the protocols of reputation, provenance, and propriety practiced by successful intellectual communities. But those communities which enjoy a long institutional legacy also develop protocols for certifying and legitimating knowledge, assessing progress, and preserving the techniques and findings that are their products.
What can we observe about the nature of intellectual work conducted on the internet and how it differs from the current and legacy academy? How is power accruing to different knowledge communities in similar or different ways? New information behaviors enabled by the internet clash with those of entrenched knowledge institutions, creating conflict and pressure for reconciliation between these two media landscapes—which are, properly understood, different epistemic environments. We hope to understand what infrastructure and context is required for knowledge communities to thrive online.
Such an inquiry is of obvious importance to efforts such as “Metascience” and “Progress Studies,” which aim to improve the social processes of scientific inquiry. It is of equal relevance to projects like “DeSci” which hope to establish internet-based productive funding and research models. We see no reason, however, that these efforts should be limited to the natural sciences. In fact, the most impressive results so far have been the utilitarian philosophical methods of the Rationalists. The future is bright for online intellectual culture; we only need understand the protocols that cultivate success.
<aside> 🗣 Interested in contributing?
We’ve created a short questionnaire to collect examples of practices within internet knowledge communities. A few examples of what might count as a nascent “knowledge community” include: fandoms, effective altruism, alternative health & wellness groups, etc.
If you’re a part of a community like this, we would love to hear from you! This is open to anyone interested in SoP, and please feel free to share with others who might have interesting responses. You can reach out to [email protected] or [email protected] with any questions.
We're setting a soft deadline for receiving responses by 7/10. Thank you!
Summer of Protocols: The Evolution of Credit Cultures Questionnaire
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Current Draft:
🕰️ V1: Our original project outline
Authorship protocols are cultural handshakes with their own standards: citations and acknowledgments, restrictions around types of authorship claims that are considered legitimate, and unstated assumptions around polite behavior.
Many new media undermine the primacy of individual authorship and originality. Formats as diverse as TikTok trends, fandom production, AI-mediated creation, and speculative financial worldbuilding in crypto instantiate and reward broader forms of crediting.
We want to chart out how the social protocols that govern “authorship” claims are undergoing evolutionary pressures to accommodate these new tools of networked production and discovery.
As part of our written output, we’ll document specific case studies of authorship norms under stress, as well as nascent authorship protocols. Examples include “dance credits,” posthumous collaborations, and fandoms outgrowing the original work. We’ll also produce a speculative interface design for exploring the “latent space” of authorship.