Open Protocols are the shared technical and social standards that enable diverse systems to interoperate without requiring permission, trust, or central coordination. Like the TCP/IP protocols that enabled the internet's explosive growth, open protocols create the connective tissue for networks of networks — allowing value, data, and coordination to flow across organizational and jurisdictional boundaries. This civic innovation domain encompasses the design, governance, and adoption of protocols that balance openness with security, flexibility with stability, and individual autonomy with collective benefit.
The philosophy of open protocols draws from the internet's founding principles: end-to-end design, permissionless innovation, and rough consensus with running code. Key intellectual contributions come from the Internet Engineering Task Force's collaborative standards process, the open source movement's governance models, and more recently, the blockchain community's experiments in cryptographic protocols and token-mediated coordination. Foundational thinkers include Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn (TCP/IP), Tim Berners-Lee (HTTP/HTML), and the cypherpunk movement that pioneered cryptographic protocols for privacy and digital sovereignty.
Contemporary open protocol development spans identity systems (DIDs, Verifiable Credentials), data sharing frameworks (Solid, ActivityPub), economic coordination (Ethereum, various L2s), and governance mechanisms (DAOs, quadratic voting protocols). Key tensions include the challenge of protocol upgrades once networks achieve scale, the governance of protocols as quasi-constitutional infrastructure, and the balance between openness and protection from capture. Organizations advancing open protocol development include the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Decentralized Identity Foundation, Protocol Labs, and numerous blockchain foundations. The field increasingly recognizes that protocols are not merely technical artifacts but social contracts encoded in software.