About Protocol Droid

Protocol Droid is a project of the Media Economies Design Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder. The name is inspired by the class of droids in Star Wars known as protocol droids, which help facilitate cross-cultural interactions.

This project is inspired by RegenHub's Protocol Library, developed by Kevin Owocki, and draws on the experience of MEDLab's CommunityRule platform.

What is a protocol?

A protocol is a pattern of interaction among people, generally in the form of a particular sequence of actions. Protocols are micro-practices — more specific than patterns and more interaction-focused than rules. A rule says "decisions are made by consensus." A protocol says "here's the step-by-step process for reaching consensus in a meeting."

Features

Browse a library of protocols contributed by the community. Author your own protocols with structured fields — steps, outcomes, practice tips. Fork existing protocols and adapt them to your context. Curate collections of protocols and share them. Tag protocols for discoverability. Export and import protocols as portable YAML files.

Self-hosting

Protocol Droid is designed to be self-hostable and whitelabel-able. It runs on a standard LAMP stack with no external dependencies — no web fonts, no CDNs, no tracking. Deploy on Cloudron, any LAMP server, or your own infrastructure. Configure your site name, tagline, and theme through a simple config file.

Sister project

Protocol Droid has a sister project: the Protocol Bicorder — a diagnostic tool for evaluating protocols along a series of gradients between opposing terms. Where Protocol Droid is for documenting and sharing protocols, the Bicorder is for analyzing and comparing them.

License

Hippocratic License (HL3-CORE) — do no harm. See firstdonoharm.dev. Source code available on Gitea.

Seed protocols

Load a starter set of 6 example protocols (Round Robin Check-In, Consent Decision-Making, Appreciative Apology, Temperature Reading, Dot Voting, Fishbowl Discussion) into your library.