Part of the 2025 Protocol Symposium
The Protocol School is a week-long intensive online event, from September 15-19, featuring a dozen 90-minute modules on various aspects of protocols. Content will be cross-disciplinary and suitable for university students, researchers, and working professionals from any background. Some prior knowledge or experience in technology will be helpful but not necessary.
A certificate will be available for participants of the Protocol School component who meet the requirements (see below). Each module will be taught by a Summer of Protocols 2025 Teaching Fellow, many of whom will go on to teach a full semester course on the topic at their home university. There is a hackathon and coworking track of the symposium that is open to Protocol School participants, and we encourage you to consider your project ideas for that track early.
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, artistic project, or business case, 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.