July 13, 2026
Protocols for Business SIG: Field Journalism in Drone Warfare Era
Participants: rafa_0x
The SIGPfB group held a logistics meeting to onboard Bel, a war correspondent with 15 years covering global conflicts including Yemen, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, Gaza, and Lebanon. The meeting was conducted via Google Meet due to Discord's high friction for external guests (requiring account creation and CAPTCHAs). The primary discussion centered on how drone warfare, particularly FPV drones, has fundamentally altered field protocols and behavioral practices for journalists in conflict zones. Unlike traditional artillery threats, FPV drones create a persistent vertical threat requiring constant awareness of appearance from above, necessitating new vehicle selection strategies, pre-planned exit routes, and tactical use of terrain and netting for concealment.
The group also discussed pre-deployment training requirements including HEFAT (Hostile Environment and First Aid Training) that covers digital security and field logistics. Additionally, the team was introduced to Harmonica, a deliberative clustering tool that Artem has been developing for two years, positioned as a middle ground between scalable but shallow surveys and deep but hard-to-scale facilitated workshops. The group agreed to coordinate with Artem on testing Harmonica with a relevant topic for future deliberation.
Next steps include forwarding follow-up questions to Bel through the Protocols for Business channel, scheduling a Harmonica session to test the tool's functionality, and reviewing feedback on a Kickcraft workshop format. The group was invited to submit questions and engagement via the group chat for continuation of the discussion.
- FPV drones fundamentally changed field journalist behavior by creating a persistent threat from above, requiring constant consideration of vertical visibility and establishing new hiding/exit route protocols distinct from traditional artillery zone survival tactics.
- Platform friction significantly impacts external participation; Discord's account creation and CAPTCHA requirements made it unsuitable for guest access, leading to a recommendation to use Zoom or Google Meet for future sessions.
- Drone warfare has introduced new tactical factors including vehicle camouflage choices (civilian 'rubbish cars' vs. armored vehicles), weather-dependent safety planning, and use of fiber-optic netting corridors as cover.
- Harmonica presents a middle-ground deliberative tool between shallow scalable surveys (Google Forms) and deep but hard-to-scale facilitated workshops (Miro), with Artem available to customize it for the group's needs.
Session Recording Summary · 67m 55s · Full notes ↗
Reading: Not clearly identified in the discussion. This session was primarily a live tool demo rather than a discussion of a shared text. A prior guest presentation by "Bell/Belle" is referenced but not detailed in the transcript.
Most of the session opened with logistical trouble getting a guest (Bell/Belle) into the Discord call, which prompted a broader complaint about Discord's friction for outside participants. The bulk of the meeting was a live demo by Artem of **Harmonica**, an AI-agent-mediated tool for collective sense-making and facilitation. The group discussed how Harmonica works, saw a live session created and a Polis-style clustering visualization, and explored whether the group could use it in an upcoming session.
- **Discord as a barrier to guests (rafa, Timber):** Bell/Belle struggled to join because Discord requires account creation and captchas. rafa concluded that for external participants they may need to use Google Meet or Zoom instead; he ultimately sent Bell a Google Meet link. Timber noted this has consistently been a "drag" for guests and "drive-by" participants (mentioning that "Bond" hates Discord despite being a good participant).
- **Artem's background:** Artem has followed Summer of Protocols and rafa's writing (since ~2021, while writing a master's thesis on decentralized governance). He worked as a governance lead in a small DAO (Protein Community) and was a member of "Folklore." His practical struggles with sense-making and community engagement motivated building Harmonica.
- **Core premise of Harmonica:** Common collective sense-making methods (retrospectives, Delphi method, road-mapping, business model canvas, value proposition canvas) are essentially *protocols*. Harmonica executes these protocols using a language model to help a group benefit from them.
- **Agent-mediated, MCP-integrated design (Artem):** Artem demoed driving Harmonica from Claude via a custom "Harmonica chat" skill connecting to an MCP server (under the hood, an API). It's being built to be usable by agents, not just as a web app. Given a topic, the agent selects from a seeded template library (it suggested a "proposal forming" template for the demo topic).
- **How a participant session works:** The agent generates a public shareable session URL. Participants enter a ChatGPT-like chat where the AI drives/prompts the conversation, asks some deterministic pre-survey questions, and cross-pollinates by asking participants to react to others' contributions. Responses feed into a "session memory/knowledge" that can produce a visual artifact or be exported as JSON.
- **Asynchronous, scalable facilitation:** Artem framed Harmonica as solving the difficulty of scaling structured conversation beyond ~8–10 people. rafa described it as an agent creating an "asynchronous focus group" and then synthesizing results for participants.
Questions & Disagreements: - **rafa's clarifying question:** Is Harmonica *running* the brainstorm, or *walking participants through* participating in it? Artem clarified it is an agent-mediated process where the agent sits between participants, driving the conversation and synthesizing. - **PAtwater's questions:** Is the link live/shareable so water colleagues could answer asynchronously (like a focus group)? And what does
Participants: rafa (UTC+1), Artem, Timber, NicolasCero, Anuraj R, PAtwater