THE PROTOCOLLEGE is an international thought collective of heterodox researchers, coalescing around the study of protocols. Through readings and activities, we build common understanding of protocolization as a phenomenon. Our mission is to establish an intellectual tradition that pays deep attention to all these "boring" things we tend to relfect the least about yet are everywhere, forming the operational cornerstone of science, technology and organizations; standards, norms, infrastructures and most of all protocols.
The Story
In Spring 2025, a few curious minds decided to come together to form a special interest group around protocol-based practices in science. There was a common sense that protocols were a cornerstone of knowledge-making practices in various technical fields but lacked a theoretical basis to properly study them in their own right. And so, Thus, the Protcollege was born out of a loose group of scholars with an interest in the philosophical meta-study of scientific practice. The basis was initially in Munich but has since expanded to cover members from California all thr way to Australia. Naturally, this makes coordination a bummer, but figuring out protocols for assembling in the network age is also part of the game.
Boundary Objects
As we coalesced around the concept protocol, it became clear that what we actually mean can be very different. Some considered protocols as operational workflows, others as recipes, and others as coordination tools. But this diversity also showed that the concept acts as an aggregator of many other related concepts and phenomena: standardization, guidelines,routinized practice, conformity, rituals, norms, bureaucracy, documentation, etc. In that way, the concept of protocol acts as a boundary object that brings knowledge, phenomena and practices from disparate social worlds closer together.
Schools of Thought
The difference of this group's approach to other emerging attempts at a generalized study of protocols such as Protocol Institute is the focus on the protocol as concept per se. Conceptual analysis, disambiguation and comparative understanding are foundamental to our philosophically-minded approach. But this conceptual focus is guided by close-quarters empirical encounter with protocols "in the wild". The original members were all philosophers using ethnographic and other socaial science methods to study protocol practices in science. This focus is important because, in contrast to an engineering-first approach to protocol study, the edge of Protocollege is closer to that of amateur naturalists, ethologists and romantic scientists yet turning the eye towards the world of behaviour and activity in human-made society. With this inquisitive view, protocols themselves are treated as forms of knowledge rather than engineered artifacts.
License
This project is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0).
See LICENSE for details.