This paper presents knowledge-oriented programming, a framework for giving high-level knowledgebased descriptions of distributed protocols.We extend the notion of knowledge-based programs of [FHMV93] by allowing high-level actions that are defined in terms of changing the state of knowledge of processes in the system.As a result, both the choice of which actions to perform and the actions themselves are defined explicitly in terms of the processes' knowledge.We concentrate on a class of high-level notify actions that can be used to abstract away details of communication.Examples are considered, including solutions to the atomic commitment problem and to the sequence transmission problem.