CFA: Summer of Protocols 2024
Lurching into my second year of program-directing an R&D program
I’m still on break with the newsletter on pause for a couple of weeks, but interrupting it to boost the Call for Applications (alt mirror link) for the Summer of Protocols 2024 program, which I’m directing again for its second year. Here’s a PDF if you’d like to forward as an attachment.
I’d appreciate any sharing/forwarding of this opportunity you can do, to suitable individuals and groups. And of course, think about applying yourself if you have an idea that fits. Read on for more on who might be a good fit.
Applications for this year are due by Friday, April 12, and I strongly recommend posting the public RFC (Request for Comment) component on the forum by tomorrow (April 1). We’ll be kicking off a 10-day public review period tomorrow, so it will really benefit your application to have the RFCs up during that period. Posting the RFCs also entitles you to request some office hours coaching from me.
Last year’s program was mostly focused on early stage exploratory research, while this year’s program is focused more on downstream applications, fieldwork, and evangelism. The program has 3 tracks.
A track of Protocol Improvement Grants (PIGs) of $90,000 over the summer for teams of 2 to take on serious protocol entrepreneurship efforts. There are 5 PIG grants up for grabs.
A track of small creative development microgrants of $1000 for people who want to try doing things like writing short stories, making up protocol memes, infographics, etc. We’re calling these PILL grants: Pill to Incept Lore and Literacy. The goal is to “protocol pill” more people. There are 20 PILL grants up for grabs right now, but we may have more available.
An institutional partner track. This is already at capacity, but check out the stuff that’s happening on it — there will be participation opportunities for some of it.
For both the PIG and PILL funding tracks, there is a simple application form, and a requirement to post an RFC in the program forum. We’re making a serious effort to make the program much more public and transparent from start to finish this year.
You can read and comment on some of the early RFCs here. If you think you can beat these ideas, you should apply. If you think you have a suggestion that can improve one of the RFCs, you should post a comment. I recommend signing up for updates from the forum if you want to keep up with the firehose of activity. You can also subscribe to the program newsletter for weekly updates.
Read the full CFA (mirror link) for details, including themes and problems of special interest.
My personal goal for this year’s program is to meme the idea of “protocol entrepreneurship” into existence. This is one reason the PILL track of the program particularly interests me. I’ve been making my own artisanal memes for a decade and a half, and I want to learn what it takes to make a larger-scale memes/inception effort happen.
While the heavy-duty PIG program is hopefully going to tackle some serious challenges and generate proof points that protocol entrepreneurship can be a thing, getting people to understand what sort of thing it is, and inspired to try it themselves, requires a second-order creative evangelism effort. So if you want to join this protocol pilling conspiracy while sharpening your meme-making skills, throw a PILL idea into the pool.
Getting this off the ground is one reason I needed to take a break from the newsletter. Directing last year’s pilot program was a very rewarding experience for me, and you can read the research output as it is being published here. I wrote up my personal reflections in my Dec 16 post, In Search of Hardness.
I’m looking forward to Round 2.
I’ll be back with regular programming in a couple of weeks.