All cohesion mechanisms impose constraints and reduce autonomy. However, standards and protocols are unique. When well-designed or evolved, they can increase the overall autonomy and agency of the coordinated participants.

This assay is part of the Autonomy and Cohesion series.

When social systems become more complex, conventions, norms and rituals emerge to absorb the access of variety. When complexity increases further, they become more sophisticated and codified as laws, standards and protocols.

Laws, standards and protocols are cohesion and coordination mechanisms. But they have significant differences. Laws are coercive mechanisms. We even speak about laws using coercive language: a law comes into force. Standards and protocols, on the other hand, are voluntary. When compliance with a standard is mandatory, that can only come from a law referring to the standard, not from the standard itself. The same is true for protocols.

Standards and protocols are now ubiquitous. Almost everything we do relies on layers of standards¹See Standards Make the World. and protocols. Thanks to another unique feature, when standards and protocols work, they are invisible. We become aware of them only when they fail.

Standards and protocols are similar – in fact, many protocols are standards – but they are not the same.

Protocols are ancient. Just think about how old greeting and parting protocols are. Standards are way more recent. They date from the beginning of the 19th century.²The mass production of machines during that period triggered the need for unification. A prominent example is the unification of screw threads. It was initiated by a paper presented by Joseph Whitworth to the Institution of Civil Engineers. The period of the Industrial Revolution was from 1760 to 1840. The paper was presented in 1841 as if to announce the start of a new era.

The second difference is that, unlike standards, protocols are not necessarily related to technology.

The third and most prominent difference between standards and protocols is related to time. Standards are static. Protocols are always about some sequence of actions. Standards may be related to time, as is the case with the UTC (Universal Time Coordinated), the ISO-8601 time format, the ISO 19235:2015 standards for analog clocks or the W3C time ontology. However, the focus of standards is on what and how, not on when. Protocols, on the other hand, are themselves temporal species. An outstretched hand invites taking, an HTTP request triggers a response, SMTP specifies timeouts. Continue reading →

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  See Standards Make the World.
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  The mass production of machines during that period triggered the need for unification. A prominent example is the unification of screw threads. It was initiated by a paper presented by Joseph Whitworth to the Institution of Civil Engineers. The period of the Industrial Revolution was from 1760 to 1840. The paper was presented in 1841 as if to announce the start of a new era.