About
The Protocol Oral History Project is an effort to honor and share the stories of protocol artists—the skilled builders and stewards of the rules, standards, and norms that shape our lives in often invisible ways, ranging from technical standards and diplomatic practices to Indigenous traditions and radical subcultures.
The project is led by Nathan Schneider, director of the Media Economies Design Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder. Website designed by Drew Hornbein. The project is made possible by support from the Siegel Family Endowment.
The Protocol Oral History Project is part of Governance Ecologies, a family of projects “expanding the repertoires for community governance.”
The color scheme on this website is inspired by Constitutional Wampum by Robert Houle. This is a tribute to the convergence in that work between the long legacy of political protocol-building through wampum belts in Indigenous communities of North America and a pixelated aesthetic that evokes life in the digital world. In the concept of protocol, the ancient practices and recent technologies converge.
The site uses the following protocol to generate the colorful wampum style grid.
First we generate a sigil by removing spaces, turning to lowercase, removing anything that isn't a consonant, removing repeat letters, find the unicode character number, and finally get the digital root of those numbers. From there the sigil digits are used to choose a color from our pallet.