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Protocol Thinking

Protocol Thinking

2020 – present·in development
Protocol Thinking illustration

Protocol Thinking (Protocol Denken in Dutch) is an architectural vision I developed and elaborated at the Emerging Technology Center of Kadaster, together with colleagues. It describes how data exchange between organisations — and especially within government — could and should work in a fundamentally different way.

Background

The internet was built on thin protocols: open standards that enforce little and leave much freedom. That has made the internet great, but also creates problems: data exchange between organisations is fragmented, context-free and difficult to trust.

Protocol Thinking proposes thinking in thick protocols — protocols that carry more than just transport agreements. They embed context, provenance, semantics and rules for collaboration.

Five principles

Protocol Thinking is built on five core principles:

  1. Digital as foundation — Society is digitalising; government intentionally aligns by taking digital as its starting point.
  2. Context is always present — Context-free data does not exist. Every piece of data has meaning within a specific context.
  3. Focus on change — Change is central, not state. Registries capture events, not just snapshots.
  4. Multiple views as standard — Never one model or API; always multiple perspectives on the same reality.
  5. Open collaboration — Protocols only emerge and evolve through open collaboration among all participants.

Architectural background

The vision is rooted in three backgrounds:

  • Event Sourcing — state changes are recorded as a sequence of events; the current state follows from these.
  • Open Source — protocols are a common good and evolve transparently.
  • Agile working — iterative and adaptive, with room for emerging insight.

The core idea: event-driven registries, in open collaboration, in a network of data streams.

My role

I largely developed and elaborated this concept myself, building on architectural work at Kadaster and inspiration from the broader technology community. It was shaped in dialogue with colleagues from Kadaster Labs and the Emerging Technology Center.

Results

SensRNet