Computer Protocol

Computer protocols are a good analogy for a conversation.

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The meaning of Hello or Hola or HELO

All communication protocols start with declaring you are open to communicate and hint at what language we communicate in.

Authenticate each party

Is the other person/computer safe to talk to? What is their status? What information can be shared with them?

Information is bidirectionally exchanged

Just like in human Conversation

Narratives/Language/Ideas must be compatible for the conversation to work

If a computer isn’t running software which is compatible then the conversation doesn’t work.

Likewise two humans that don’t have compatible language, ideas and beliefs about the subject matter in kind have a hard job communicating with each other.

This is a systems exchange - just like human conversation

This is also a Systems Exchange for the presumed benefit of both systems.

Was the information received? ACKnowledgements and checksums

This is like Reflecting Back - was the Narrative received?.

Acknowledgements can be like YES/NO - the problem is what are we saying yes/no to?

Checksums are more complete since presumably they show that the information was received correctly and fully.

But checksums can fail - it is possible for two sets of data to have the same checksum.

Compression - it's like two computers have compatible narratives - enables faster communication

Two computers that both talk say ‘brotli’ which is a new more efficient compression algorithm from Google will be able to transmit information to each other faster than two which are using the older ‘gzip’ compression.

The same analogy exists for humans. A team which speaks a common more efficient language will be able to communicate faster and more effectively.

Leads to the concept of Clarification.