Scott Jellen
Independent Researcher · Protocol Designer
I study systems whose inherited rules no longer fit present conditions, then develop protocols, mechanisms, and institutional models for how those systems might operate differently. Through Jellen Protocol Lab, I publish research across protocol infrastructure, labor and economic systems, public mechanisms, media platforms, institutional redesign, and public-memory systems.
The Universal Sports Graph (USG) is the Lab's flagship protocol program, translating fragmented sports rights, access, and entitlement into interoperable infrastructure.
Featured Paper: Something for Something
A public-policy whitepaper proposing a coordinated healthcare and tax-administration bargain that gives every taxpayer, spouse, and dependent a $5,000 annual ceiling on personal liability for nationally covered medical care. The framework preserves private insurance while using a separate $10,000 commercial claims attachment for federal risk sharing, removes patients from financial disputes after they reach the ceiling, converts Tax Day into an annual Household Account check-in, continuously updates withholding and benefits, and returns measurable employer health-plan savings to workers.
Start Here
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
Protocol Infrastructure
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
Public Mechanisms
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.
Featured Paper: Extra Life
An industry strategy whitepaper arguing that the console industry can avoid a slow-motion crash by shifting from reset economics to continuity economics. The paper proposes that the durable center of the console ecosystem should be the customer's account, library, saves, purchases, friends, history, and access rights, supported by extended hardware generations, purchase protection, free basic online play, cross-device entitlements, evergreen first-party catalogues, rapid porting, customer trust, and a Platform Continuity operating model.
Extra Life
Extending the Console Generation in an Age of Software Abundance and Hardware Scarcity
Research
Research programs and major works across protocol infrastructure, institutional mechanisms, economic systems, media platforms, and public adaptation.
The Lab's work is organized here by research object rather than publication type. Programs group multiple artifacts around sustained questions; major works stand on their own. Whitepapers, RFCs, briefs, simulations, and implementation outlines remain available through their respective archives.
Research Programs
Sustained research systems

Active Protocol Program
Universal Sports Graph
A standards-oriented protocol stack for representing sports rights, access, entitlement, and settlement infrastructure through RFCs, registries, and reference artifacts.
Core Outputs
Direction
Canonical identifiers, registry hardening, resolver deployment, pilot implementation, and rights graph interoperability.

Active Research Program
The Shorter Working Life
A labor lifecycle research stack focused on reducing required lifetime labor through staged institutional adaptation, retirement modernization, phased participation, and fiscal guardrails.
Core Outputs
Direction
Political conditions, sectoral adoption, employer adaptation, retirement policy modernization, and the social structure of time beyond required labor.

Published Mechanism Stack
Shutdown Stabilizer
A public mechanism proposal for preventing essential federal workers from becoming involuntary creditors during government shutdowns.
Core Outputs
Direction
Payroll continuity authority, Treasury advances, statutory implementation, shutdown resilience, and operational behavior under prolonged funding lapses.

Active Research Program
The Twenty-First Slav Epic: A Century After Slavs for Humanity
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.
Core Outputs
Direction
Symbolic monument design, public-memory systems, cultural continuity, rupture, language, sovereignty, and interpretive infrastructure.

Research Cluster
Media & Platform Infrastructure
A set of papers and design artifacts exploring how media platforms, synthetic content, audience participation, rights systems, discovery, and distribution economics reshape platform infrastructure.
Core Outputs
Direction
Streaming economics, synthetic media formats, participatory storytelling, discovery systems, content tiering, platform governance, and monetization.
Major Research
Standalone works
Substantial research objects that stand independently rather than as multi-artifact programs.
Something for Something
A bounded-risk model for limiting household exposure to covered healthcare costs while preserving the existing roles of insurers, employers, and public programs.
Minimum Viable Classroom
An education operating model centered on completion, attendance, remediation, measurable outcomes, and constrained cost.
Extra Life
A strategic operating model for extending the current console generation through longer hardware cycles, portable purchases, free online play, and streaming as a service layer.
Less Than Net Zero
A systems proposal examining how large-scale energy abundance and infrastructure expansion could change the constraints surrounding decarbonization and economic growth.
The Sports Spin-Off
A structural model for separating major college athletics from the academic institutions that currently contain and subsidize them.
Research Method
The Lab works through structured artifacts that clarify how systems represent rights, absorb shocks, shift incentives, and transition without requiring total institutional replacement.
The research page maps the intellectual structure of the Lab. The archive pages preserve the full publication record by artifact type.
Featured Paper: The Twenty-First Slav Epic
A speculative design whitepaper proposing Slav Epic 21, an independent six-faced symbolic public-memory monument derived from Alphonse Mucha's Slav Epic one century after its concluding canvas, Slavs for Humanity. The paper treats the original twenty canvases as a symbolic source system and translates their recurring forms language, memory, war, treaty, exile, labor, custody, revival, shadow, and humanity into a new spatial monument organized around humanity, war, memory, sovereignty, diaspora, and common work.
Protocols
Versioned protocol specifications for the Universal Sports Graph (USG), including informational and standards-track RFCs, machine-validated schemas, registry architecture, and reference artifacts.
USG Reference Resolver (v0.1)
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.
USG Reference Registry
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.
USG Registry Architecture
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.
USG Reference Registry
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.
USG Entitlement Token Profile
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.
The Universal Sports Graph
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.
Featured Paper: The Universal Sports Graph
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.
Featured Protocol
A specification for representing sports rights as interoperable data.
RFC 0001: The Universal Sports Graph
Defines rights as structured data, access as an API, and settlement through a neutral clearinghouse.
Briefs
Structured orientation documents supporting active research programs, protocols, and framework papers, with explicit scope, non-goals, comparisons, and implementation logic.
Free Phase Memo
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.
UBI Contrast Brief
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 Mechanism Memo
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 Memo
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.
Operational Simulation
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.
The Shutdown Stabilizer Act
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.
The Shutdown Stabilizer Implementation Outline
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.
Why Sports Rights Need Neutral Infrastructure
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.
The Universal Sports Graph: Pilot Brief
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.
The Human, the Robot, and the Fire
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.
Public Spec #1: Surface "Surprise Me" at the System Level on Xbox
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.
Featured Brief
Explains why sports rights failures are structural, not contractual.
Why Sports Rights Need Neutral Infrastructure
Argues for a neutral representation layer and situates USG as infrastructure for rights, not a platform.
Whitepapers
Independent whitepapers modeling industries and public systems through interoperability and protocol design.

Something for Something
Capping Americans' Exposure to Healthcare Risk

Extra Life
Extending the Console Generation in an Age of Software Abundance and Hardware Scarcity

The Twenty-First Slav Epic
A Century After Slavs for Humanity

The Shorter Working Life: Transition Simulation
A Twelve-Year Institutional Scenario for Reducing Required Lifetime Labor

The Shorter Working Life: Implementation Outline
Institutional Pathways for Reducing Required Lifetime Labor

The Shorter Working Life
A Framework for Reducing Required Lifetime Labor

The Shutdown Stabilizer
Ending Involuntary Credit During Government Shutdowns

The Universal Sports Graph
A Protocol for Rights, Reach, and Real-Time Access

The Content Layer
A Constitutional Upgrade to the Browser Start Page

Minimum Viable Classroom
Blueprint for Universal Access to Quality Learning in America

The Shadow Subscription
How Netflix Turns Non-Subscribers Into a Revenue Stream

Less Than Net Zero
What Happens When America Makes Electricity Free?

Artificial Enhanced Experience Advertising
Turning Narrative-Driven Localized Ads Into Real-World Transactions

The $1,000 Problem / The $750 Solution
How Car Companies Could Solve Ownership's Hidden Cost Trap

The Fourth Act
How Theaters Could Host the Next Era of Storytelling

The Hybrid Season
A Scheduling Reframe for the NBA, Its Partners, and Its Fans

The Sports Spin-Off
A Long-Term Hedging Strategy for Higher Ed Institutions Facing Demographic Decline
Featured Paper: The Shorter Working Life
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.
About
Founder & Principal Researcher
I study systems whose inherited rules no longer fit present conditions, then develop protocols, mechanisms, and institutional models for how those systems might operate differently.
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 protocol program is the Universal Sports Graph (USG), a standards-oriented 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 and economic systems, public mechanisms, media infrastructure, institutional redesign, and public-memory work.
Featured Paper: The Shutdown Stabilizer
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.
Featured Implementation
An operational model for maintaining payroll during federal shutdowns.
The Shutdown Stabilizer Implementation Outline
Defines automatic activation, continued payroll, and reconciliation through a Treasury Payroll Continuity Authority.
Let's Talk
Let's Talk
I welcome thoughtful conversations with people building, funding, researching, or exploring work connected to systems under transition, protocol infrastructure, institutional mechanisms, and new models for complex public and digital systems.
Contact
The best way to reach me is by email or LinkedIn. I'm especially interested in conversations around protocol and systems design, institutional adaptation, public mechanisms, platform infrastructure, and research that can move from an idea into an inspectable model, specification, or implementation framework.
Reach me through
Protocol design · institutional mechanisms · systems research · public infrastructure · platform architecture
Featured Legislative Draft
A statute-ready version of the Shutdown Stabilizer.
The Shutdown Stabilizer Act
Codifies authority, activation, payroll continuity, and reconciliation into federal law with defined safeguards and capacity.
