I develop protocol-oriented research and reference infrastructure for systems under transition. Through Jellen Protocol Lab, I publish RFC-style specifications, briefs, whitepapers, registries, and simulations focused on rights, incentives, access, labor, media, and public systems. The lab's flagship protocol work is the Universal Sports Graph (USG), a standards-grade framework that turns sports rights into machine-readable entitlement objects and access into a real-time interoperability API.
The Universal Sports Graph defines a neutral interoperability standard for live sports: a rights registry, a universal Access API, and a league-governed clearinghouse that reconcile revenue and audit logs. By treating broadcast rights as structured data and access as an API, the Graph converts fragmentation into incremental revenue without cannibalizing subscriptions—transforming sports distribution from a patchwork of apps into shared infrastructure. The model introduces $4.99 day-passes, a 40 / 40 / 20 revenue split, and phased governance toward a global, regulator-aligned standard.
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This work is organized as a set of research systems. Some artifacts define protocols and reference infrastructure. Others apply the same method to public policy, institutional design, and operational mechanisms.
The best way to read the site is in layers: start with the core paper, move into the formal or operational artifact, then inspect the implementation surface.
Path 1
The Universal Sports Graph (USG) is the flagship protocol stack. It begins as a whitepaper, becomes an RFC specification, and continues into registry and resolver infrastructure.
The blueprint whitepaper introducing USG as neutral infrastructure for representing sports rights as interoperable data.
The formal specification defining the protocol architecture, access model, and settlement logic.
The canonical data layer: stable identifiers, schema-backed records, and versioned registry state.
The read-only reference surface for resolving canonical USG records.
Path 2
The Shutdown Stabilizer shows the same method applied to public policy: define the structural failure, translate it into an operational mechanism, then formalize it into law.
The whitepaper reframing shutdowns as a structural credit problem for essential federal workers.
The operational framework for activation, payroll continuity, and reconciliation.
The statute-ready draft formalizing the authority, safeguards, and capacity required.
A 30-day scenario showing how the mechanism behaves during an active shutdown.
Additional work extends this method across labor systems, media infrastructure, education, mobility, energy, and public institutional design.
A framework paper arguing that the modern work lifecycle no longer matches current economic and demographic conditions. It proposes reducing the duration of mandatory full-time labor over time, using retirement as the primary institutional mechanism for transition.
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Program-level research across rights infrastructure, labor lifecycle design, public mechanisms, media platforms, and institutional adaptation.
This page organizes the Lab's work by research program rather than artifact type. Whitepapers, RFCs, briefs, simulations, and implementation outlines are grouped according to the questions they support.
Active Research Program
A research track exploring how societies encode historical memory, cultural rupture, sovereignty, language, and collective identity into durable symbolic forms, public objects, and interpretive systems.
Symbolic monument design, public-memory systems, cultural continuity, rupture, language, sovereignty, and interpretive infrastructure.
Active Protocol Program
A standards-grade protocol stack for representing sports rights, access, entitlement, and settlement infrastructure through RFCs, registries, and reference artifacts.
Canonical identifiers, registry hardening, resolver deployment, and rights graph interoperability.
Active Research Program
A labor lifecycle research stack focused on reducing required lifetime labor through staged institutional adaptation, retirement modernization, phased participation, and fiscal guardrails.
Political conditions, sectoral adoption, employer adaptation, and retirement policy modernization.
Published Mechanism Stack
A public mechanism proposal for preventing essential federal workers from becoming involuntary creditors during government shutdowns.
Payroll continuity authority, Treasury advances, shutdown resilience, and statutory portability.
Research Cluster
A set of papers exploring how media platforms, synthetic content, audience participation, rights systems, and distribution economics reshape platform infrastructure.
Streaming economics, synthetic media formats, participatory storytelling, content tiering, and platform monetization.
The Lab works through structured artifacts that clarify how systems represent rights, absorb shocks, shift incentives, and transition without requiring total institutional replacement.
Research programs organize the canon by thesis and direction. The archive pages organize the same work by publication type.
A policy brief proposing a narrowly scoped continuity mechanism that preserves payroll for essential federal workers during government shutdowns, preventing them from functioning as involuntary short-term creditors of the federal government.
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Versioned protocol specifications for the Universal Sports Graph (USG), including informational and standards-track RFCs, machine-validated schemas, registry architecture, and reference artifacts.
Minimal Read-Only Identifier Resolution Service
A reference implementation enabling deterministic resolution of canonical Universal Sports Graph (USG) identifiers against a pinned registry snapshot. The resolver is read-only, non-production, and exists solely to make the protocol inspectable in practice.
Canonical Identifiers & Metadata for USG Implementations (v0.1.1)
The USG Reference Registry v0.1.1 is a patch release that hardens the reference registry with CI-enforced schema validation, referential integrity checks, and deterministic dependency resolution. No registry semantics or identifiers were changed. This release marks the first CI-enforced, pilot-ready registry snapshot aligned with RFC 0003 (USG Registry Architecture), providing a reproducible data layer for entitlement validation, rights resolution, and settlement workflows.
Standards-Track Specification for Canonical Sports Rights Registries
RFC 0003 defines the Registry Architecture for the Universal Sports Graph (USG). It normatively specifies registry object models, canonical identifiers, lifecycle and versioning semantics, deterministic JSON formatting, SHA-256 integrity requirements, index structures, federation and authority rules, key registry integration, and validation requirements. This RFC formalizes how USG registries are structured, validated, and federated in pilot and production implementations.
Canonical Identifiers & Metadata for USG Implementations (v0.1.0)
The USG Reference Registry provides the first canonical dataset of leagues, teams, venues, broadcasters, rights bundles, and events for the Universal Sports Graph. It defines stable identifiers, schema-backed JSON records, deterministic formatting, machine-generated indexes, and registry-level metadata aligned with RFC 0001 and RFC 0002. This artifact anchors entitlement validation, rights resolution, and clearinghouse settlement in real-world implementations.
A Standards-Track Specification for Tokenized Sports Access
This RFC defines the USG Entitlement Token Profile, a standards-track specification for issuing, validating, and enforcing tokenized authorization within the Universal Sports Graph. It provides mandatory claims, optional extensions, security and privacy requirements, replay protection, error semantics, and verification logic for interoperable sports access.
A Protocol for Rights, Reach, and Real-Time Access
This RFC defines the Universal Sports Graph (USG), a neutral interoperability framework for sports rights registration, tokenized access, and clearinghouse settlement. It treats broadcast rights as structured data to enable transparent distribution, programmable contracts, and federated sports access.
Structured orientation documents supporting active research programs, protocols, and framework papers, with explicit scope, non-goals, comparisons, and implementation logic.
What time beyond required labor becomes
A companion memo to The Shorter Working Life stack clarifying what a shorter working life is intended to create beyond the reduction of required labor itself. It explains that the free phase is not idleness, pure leisure, or the absence of contribution, but the portion of life no longer governed by mandatory full-time labor, where care, civic participation, mentoring, education, creative work, self-maintenance, optional labor, and local institution-building can continue beyond the baseline compulsion of market participation.
Why this framework begins with time, not income
A companion brief to The Shorter Working Life stack clarifying how the project differs from universal basic income. It explains that while both frameworks respond to labor disruption, automation, and productivity change, The Shorter Working Life begins by reducing the amount of labor that remains structurally required across a lifetime rather than by starting with income transfer.
Retirement as labor infrastructure
A companion memo to The Shorter Working Life stack explaining why retirement is the primary institutional mechanism through which reductions in required lifetime labor can be staged, administered, and made legible. It reframes retirement as labor infrastructure, shows how it absorbs reduced labor demand through lifecycle adjustment, and explains why partial and phased retirement function as the transition technology of the shorter working life.
Fiscal conditions for reducing required lifetime labor
A companion memo to The Shorter Working Life stack defining the fiscal conditions under which a staged reduction in required lifetime labor could remain plausible. Clarifies the difference between mixed-participation transition and mass early retirement, then maps the core conditions, sources of strain, and guardrails that determine whether the transition remains fiscally serious.
Federal shutdown: payroll continuity in practice
A time-based operational simulation showing how payroll continuity behaves during a federal shutdown. Tracks activation, disbursement, reconciliation, and second-order effects across a 30-day shutdown period.
Draft legislative language for payroll continuity during federal shutdowns
A legislative draft establishing a Treasury Payroll Continuity Authority to maintain payroll for essential federal employees during shutdowns. Defines authority, activation, payment, reconciliation, safeguards, and capacity in statute-readable form.
Operational framework for payroll continuity during federal shutdowns
A policy implementation outline establishing a Treasury Payroll Continuity Authority to maintain payroll for essential federal employees during shutdowns. Payments are treated as temporary advances and reconciled automatically once appropriations are restored.
Foundational orientation memo
A short orientation memo explaining why recurring sports rights failures are structural rather than contractual, and why neutral representation infrastructure is a necessary precondition for coordination. This memo provides context for the USG protocol stack and related work.
A single-season, league-platform pilot for the Universal Sports Graph.
An 8-page implementation brief translating the USG whitepaper and RFC 0001 into a real-world pilot: rights schema v0.1, Access API stub, clearinghouse sandbox, governance structure, KPIs, and next steps for running a 2026 single-season, $4.99 day-pass pilot between a league and a streaming platform.
A foundational memo on Humanity First Platforms
A foundational platform memo unifying multiple whitepapers into a single thesis: that the platforms replacing our institutions must be redesigned for humanity, not just scale. Introduces Humanity First Platforms and outlines core design patterns for building, governing, and sustaining next-generation systems.
A system-level design brief for content discovery on Xbox
A public design brief examining how elevating Xbox's existing "Surprise Me" feature to the system level could reduce choice fatigue, improve engagement, and surface latent value across the Xbox ecosystem. The brief treats interface affordances as system primitives rather than isolated UI features.
Independent whitepapers modeling industries and public systems through interoperability and protocol design.
A Twelve-Year Institutional Scenario for Reducing Required Lifetime Labor
Institutional Pathways for Reducing Required Lifetime Labor
A Framework for Reducing Required Lifetime Labor
A Protocol for Rights, Reach, and Real-Time Access
A Constitutional Upgrade to the Browser Start Page
Blueprint for Universal Access to Quality Learning in America
How Netflix Turns Non-Subscribers Into a Revenue Stream
What Happens When America Makes Electricity Free?
Turning Narrative-Driven Localized Ads Into Real-World Transactions
How Car Companies Could Solve Ownership's Hidden Cost Trap
How Theaters Could Host the Next Era of Storytelling
A Scheduling Reframe for the NBA, Its Partners, and Its Fans
A Long-Term Hedging Strategy for Higher Ed Institutions Facing Demographic Decline
Published a symbolic design paper proposing a twenty-first response to Alphonse Mucha's Slav Epic a century after Slavs for Humanity. The paper treats the original twenty canvases as a source system for a six-faced public-memory monument, translating motifs of language, sovereignty, exile, labor, war, and collective inheritance into a contemporary object shaped by the century between 1926 and 2021.
Published a memo clarifying what a shorter working life is intended to create beyond the reduction of required labor itself. The paper argues that the free phase is not idleness, pure leisure, or the absence of contribution, but the portion of life no longer governed by mandatory full-time labor, where care, civic participation, mentoring, education, creative work, self-maintenance, optional labor, and local institution-building can continue beyond the baseline compulsion of market participation.
Published a contrast brief clarifying how The Shorter Working Life differs from universal basic income. The paper argues that while both frameworks respond to automation, productivity change, labor disruption, and the weakening relationship between work and economic security, The Shorter Working Life begins by adjusting the structure of required labor itself rather than by starting with income transfer.
Published a mechanism memo explaining why retirement is the primary institutional lever within The Shorter Working Life framework. The paper reframes retirement as labor infrastructure, showing how it can absorb reduced labor demand through lifecycle adjustment rather than only through unemployment, underemployment, or forced reallocation. It also explains why partial and phased retirement function as the transition technology of the shorter working life.
Founder & Principal Researcher
I design protocol-oriented models for making rights, incentives, access, and institutional systems more legible, testable, and improvable. My work produces schemas, whitepapers, standards-style documents, and reference artifacts for complex systems that are difficult to inspect at scale.
My background is in software and interface design, and I approach institutions through those lenses: as interfaces, constraint systems, and architectures where small structural decisions compound into larger outcomes. My work focuses on protocol design, systems modeling, rights architecture, and institutional mechanism design.
I founded Jellen Protocol Lab as an independent home for this research. Its flagship program is the Universal Sports Graph (USG), a standards-grade framework for representing sports rights, entitlement structures, and interoperable distribution through RFC-style specifications, JSON schemas, and a versioned reference registry. Beyond USG, the Lab maintains research across labor systems, public mechanisms, media infrastructure, and institutional design.
I welcome thoughtful conversations with people building, funding, or exploring work connected to protocol design, infrastructure systems, rights modeling, and institutional architecture.
The best way to reach me is by email or LinkedIn. I'm especially interested in discussions around front-end systems as interfaces to complex infrastructure, structured models for real-world institutional problems, and research that can become inspectable public infrastructure.
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