Part of the 2025 Protocol Symposium

The Protocol School is a week-long intensive online event, from September 15-19, featuring a dozen intensive short courses on various aspects of protocols. Courses will be cross-disciplinary, roughly college-level, and suitable for university students, researchers, and working professionals from any background. Some background in technology will be helpful but not necessary. A certification will be available for participants of the Protocol School component who meet the requirements (see below). Each of these topics will be covered in a 90-minute intensive short course taught by a Summer of Protocols 2025 Teaching Fellow.

Application Form (Deadline: August 15, 2025)

Curriculum

  • Introduction to protocols
  • Technology
    • Cyber-physical systems
    • Digital Institutions
  • Art
    • Protocols of Storytelling
    • Protocol Art
    • Musicalization
  • Organization and Society
    • Designing Trust
    • Organizational Coordination
  • Humanities
    • Protocol governance
    • Designing digital worlds
    • Protocol social science
  • Applications and fieldwork

Protocol School Certificate

Participants in the Protocol School who complete the following requirements will be eligible to earn a Protocol Studies Certificate:

  • Attend at least 8 of the 12 school sessions, and participate according to the instructor’s expectations (which may include in-session exercises).
  • Prototype, plan, or design a protocol-themed project through the co-working sessions, such as a technical contribution, scholarly study, or an artistic project, which you will be expected to briefly present at the final session as a lightning talk.
  • Read the Protocol Reader, and post a brief review in our Discord community by the end of the Symposium week.

While you can attend the Protocol School without aiming to earn the certificate, we highly encourage you to aim to earn it. Our goal in designing this certification component is not to create yet another meaningless credential, but to create an informal but serious marker of basic foundational literacy and knowledge, as well as set interested participants up for taking on more ambitious protocol-themed projects beyond the symposium week.

For those who earn the certificate, we will aim to create suitable scaffolding for follow-on support through the program, such as appropriate Discord channels, suitable Special Interest Group (SIG) call tracks, mentoring, and coaching support for future grant and funding opportunities both within the SoP program and beyond. Earning the certification should prove useful to those aiming to make serious contributions to the study of protocols, take on protocol entrepreneurship projects, or pursue writing and art projects.

Logistics

  • When: September 15-19 (3 sessions per day)
  • Where: Online
  • Who: 50 participants from any background
  • Format: Twelve, ninety-minute modules
  • Application Deadline: August 15
  • Application Form

The Protocol School is part of the 2025 Protocol Symposium, which also includes other activities that may be of interest to participants.