In civic tech, we’ve gotten pretty good at saying how not to do things.

Don’t build from the top down.
Don’t ignore the user.
Don’t digitize dysfunction.

Important lessons, to be sure. But slogans like “build with, not for” are not blueprints. And while we’ve produced a forest of “open data playbooks,” they’re often too broad, too conceptual—or simply too disconnected from the messiness of real institutions and everyday implementation.

What gives me hope, and what I believe defines the next wave of urban and civic tech, is something older and more elemental than the latest digital trend: protocols.

Not as jargon. As practice.

Protocols give us a way to specify how things actually get done. And in doing so, they give us a pathway to build better—not just imagine better.

In my work over the years—whether in ed tech, water infrastructure, or civic innovation—I’ve consistently run into the same challenge: not resistance to change, but confusion about how to change.

Often the problem isn’t too much process or too little. It’s the lack of clarity about whether a process exists at all, if it still applies, or who has the authority to say. Documents go out of date. Roles blur. Chains of decision-making drift into ambiguity. And when that happens, good ideas stall and momentum fades—not because people don’t care, but because the path forward is uncertain.

This isn’t a problem unique to any one agency or city or government entity. It’s endemic across the civic landscape. But protocols offer a way through.

As the Summer of Protocols puts it, protocols are “a minimal agreement that makes a maximal difference.” They’re not rules or algorithms. They’re scaffolding for collaboration. They reduce ambiguity not by dictating outcomes, but by clarifying roles, steps, and expectations.

Where slogans ask us to care and shift perspective, protocols show us how.

They provide the connective tissue between vision and implementation—between policy and lived experience. They help frontline staff trust what’s supposed to happen. They help communities understand when their voice is heard. They make the civic machine intelligible again.

We’re not alone in seeing this shift. The newly announced $120 million Recoding America Fund reflects a broader movement. Jennifer Pahlka’s Recoding America makes the case vividly:

“Just when we most need our government to work... it is faltering. But it’s not more money or more tech we need… [it’s] the approach taking hold that keeps pace with today's world and reclaims government for the people it is supposed to serve.”

Government doesn’t need to be rebranded. It needs to be restructured—from the ground up, protocol by protocol. That’s how we move beyond the culture of cascading abstractions, where lofty goals become warped by layers of interpretation and inertia.

Protocols don’t pretend to solve all of this. But they give us a way to meet the complexity of modern governance with tools that are coherent, collaborative, and clear.

Cities are not machines. They are living conversations. And protocols—done well—help us speak to one another across silos, systems, and time.

That’s why I’m optimistic. Because in a world hungry for simplicity, protocols offer something deeper: shared meaning, clear practice, and the quiet power to build together again.

Learn more and see in particular the study group on organizational dynamics:

Here's a post providing context on what I mean by "Written by the Patchwork Protocol."