Protocol Bicorder Workshop with Nathan Schneider
The patterns at the foundation of civic life
A handshake is a protocol. So is a board meeting. So is a potluck. So is TCP/IP.
Nathan Schneider — professor at CU Boulder, director of the Media Economies Design Lab, and author of Governable Spaces — has spent years thinking about protocols as a third institutional form alongside governments and corporations: patterns of interaction among agents that could, if cultivated intentionally, help us address climate change, govern online spaces, and rebuild the civic virtues we’ve let atrophy.
In April, Nathan brought us the Protocol Bicorder: a web tool named as a nod to Star Trek’s tricorder, but designed for slowness rather than speed. You enter a protocol, declare your standpoint, and work through a gradient-based questionnaire that surfaces the hidden logic beneath your social agreements. We spent five minutes as a group analyzing protocols we’d chosen ourselves — meeting scheduling, hugging, the McCarthy Decider, reception rituals — and the conversation that followed about how culturally variable even a “simple” protocol like hugging turns out to be is worth the watch alone.
One early finding that’s already emerging from real and synthetic data: there’s a clean cluster distinction between institutional protocols (transparent, trust-built-in-public) and vernacular protocols (opaque, trust-built-through-boundaries). And the most durable protocols appear to carry internal contradictions — some elements rigid, others flexible — as a load-bearing structural feature.
Benjamin closed the session by naming what’s at stake for OpenCivics: 2026 is our year of protocols, focused on disaster response, preparedness, and community sovereignty. A distributed knowledge commoning swarm is planned for May–June to harvest protocols from communities doing mutual aid and disaster relief on the ground. This conversation is the theoretical grounding for that work.
Nathan Schneider is a professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and director of the Media Economies Design Lab. His previous book is Governable Spaces (University of California Press). This session was recorded at the OpenCivics Bi-Weekly Network Assembly on April 21, 2026.