Forecasting and prioritizing risks seems to be what EA is allocating a lot of its resources towards, but is there a field in EA that works on global catastrophe preparation?

I imagine that we could come up with more things like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, in the context of optimizing the “re-boot of society” in case of a catastrophic event.

We certainly cannot predict and be prepared for all the events that will pose a threat to our civilization’s continued flourishing, so preparation could be a field to explore.

Protocol vs Platforms, in SaaS

In a lot of cases, protocols (e.g. Ethereum, Mastodon) are better than platforms (Central Banks, Twitter) when it comes to

1. protecting privacy and free speech
2.  expandability and integration

I see organizations that are working on protocols in the scope of social networks. (e.g. Bluesky) But I’m not sure if the 2nd advantage I stated above is been explored more.

To expand on the above statement, I believe the protocol-first architecture could be applied to how SaaS is built as well. The de-facto way of building a SaaS is as follows.

1. You define data models. (e.g. products, orders, documents, etc)
2. You create a public API so other software could interact with your SaaS.

The protocol-first way of building a SaaS might be something like

1. Create specifications to represent models along with the governance structure to update the specs.
2. Implement the specification and build an interface for customers to use.
3. Other SaaS
   1. build services/middlewares to expand on the data which your SaaS generates.
   2. Integrate with your SaaS.

which is similar to how protocols in Web3.0 are built. 

Protocol-first Shopify or Protocol-first Salesforce could be something intriguing.

I appreciate it if someone could share existing works similar to this. Feedback is welcome as well.

Thanks.