protocolcity 0.1.0

ProtocolCity BluePrint — found a city, serve the Office (cabinets home; map annex)

🏙️ Protocol City

Protocol City is a governed digital city where humans and AI agents build products together — and the products it ships exist to give everyone else the same leverage.

The founding line, written before any of the tooling existed, still holds:

Every bot is a worker, every .md is a law, and every contributor becomes a citizen.

One operator runs a workforce of AI agents — Claude, Grok, Cursor, Codex — across multiple products, from one machine. No agent framework, no SaaS dependency, no vendor lock. Coordination happens through a protocol: files, tickets, and signed work — durable, auditable, human-readable.

The city

The metaphor is not decoration; every term maps to something real and running.

In the city	What it means	Concretely, today
The city	The whole governed system: every product, agent, human, and rule under one charter	Everything under ~/Developer, the protocolcity GitHub org, this brand
City Hall	Where the city is governed — charter, records, product registry, brand. No product code lives here. One of three rooms citizens operate	This repo (BluePrint's own contribution — no engine brand)
Neighborhoods	The places where work happens. Each is independent — its own repo, its own local law, its own ledger of work — but protocol-compliant at the city level	tradeOS, TP, socials… (see table below)
Desk	The room where every job is filed, claimed, and signed. No work moves by chat or memory — it moves by ticket.	Powered by WorkLane (TP internally)
Dispatch	The room where the workforce is scheduled and sent out — identities, shifts, who works what	Powered by WorkForce (orchestrator; extraction gated)
The workforce	AI agents employed by the city — any vendor. Each has a registered identity, a job description, a schedule, and signs everything it does	5 lanes + report jobs on launchd, signing into TP
Citizens	The humans. Bots execute; humans govern — citizens hold the taste, the gates, and the final word	The founder today; the v1 role ladder (visitor → resident → builder → architect → citizen) is the future community model
Laws	The rules — always written down, always readable, one owner per rule. Documentation is the interface: if it isn't in an .md, it isn't law	Every AGENTS.md, PROCESS.md, charter, and ADR in the city

One metaphor family. The city is the only lens — rooms, desk, workforce, neighborhoods, citizens, laws. Where you see store (a ticket store, a store slug), it's developer vocabulary for the data-store artifact; citizens say ledger ("each neighborhood keeps a ledger at the Desk"). Never a second retail metaphor; in prose the image is always the desk.

Two audiences, one name each. Citizens think in rooms — City Hall, Dispatch, Desk. No instruction a citizen must follow may require an engine name; engine brands appear only as "powered by" credits. Developers think in engines — WorkLane and WorkForce are the GitHub/PyPI artifacts, each carrying its room when sold standalone. Wayfinding: door label == destination header == room name, always (engines are never navigation targets).

Three registers, one owner each. So the city stays legible to a newcomer, every term speaks in exactly one register. Operational words — the ones you must know to run the city (worker, contract, roster, ticket, dashboard) — are plain industry terms, owned by the Charter reserved-words table; a filename must pass the same bar (say what it is from the name alone). Civic-metaphor words (city, neighborhood, citizen, city hall, desk) are brand voice only — fine in this glossary and on surface subtitles, never required to read an operational doc, and never a filename. Boundary artifacts (marketing, exports, public READMEs) speak plain industry terms always — the reader hasn't adopted the world yet. Concretely here, the three dashboards are ProtocolCity's own surfaces — Projects (City Hall), Workers (Dispatch), Tickets (Desk) — plain function words in-city; room name is the header; engine brand is the powered-by credit (or the product title when installed standalone).

A neighborhood is the unit of independence: it can be a live trading system, a content operation, or a dormant experiment, and the city doesn't care — as long as it keeps the protocol. Keeping the protocol means three things: its law is written (AGENTS.md), its work is ticketed (filed at the Desk), and its workers sign what they do.

Neighborhoods today

Neighborhood	What happens there	Work orders	Status
tradeOS	Trading alerts, journal, broker automation	t-*	Live — real money, launchd services, 4 agent lanes
ticketingprotocol	The Desk engine (ships publicly as WorkLane)	tp-*	Live — its own agent lane works its own backlog
socials	Build-in-public content operation	so-*	Drafting — posting is citizen-only
Protocol City (City Hall)	Governance, registry, research	pc-*	Active — founder-present sessions, no lanes yet

Retired neighborhoods keep their records: health_ai (v1 empty scaffold) lives in _archive/v1-city/health_ai/ — its tool names (create_neighborhood, check_doc_compliance) survive as the seed of the future scaffold/lint tooling.

Founding principles

Carried forward from the v1 mission, proven by the running system:

1. Bots execute, humans govern. Agents work autonomously inside their lanes; anything public-facing, irreversible, or matter-of-taste is citizen-gated.
2. Every action is signed. Work orders, comments, and commits carry the identity that made them — a tamper-evident history of who did what.
3. Documentation is the interface. The city is legible to humans and agents through the same files. New agent, new vendor, new person: read the law, start working.
4. The protocol is open; the services are premium. The coordination layer ships free and vendor-neutral (WorkLane, Apache-2.0). Products built on it can be businesses.
5. Every folder has a purpose. Strict file hygiene isn't tidiness — it's what makes a city navigable by anyone, including a graph view.

The schema

Underneath the metaphor, every product slots into one of three layers:

Layer	Owns	In the city (room)	Product (engine)
Store	The work — tickets, claims, signed authors, audit trail	Desk	WorkLane
Orchestrator	The workers — identities, schedules, dispatch, budgets	Dispatch	WorkForce (extraction gated; pattern runs today as launchd lanes/jobs)
Workplace	The code the workers act on	A neighborhood	tradeOS (and every future app)

The orchestrator — who works, when, with what authority — is the layer the industry keeps burying inside single-vendor runtimes. The case for extracting it as a neutral product: docs/research/orchestrator-layer-2026-07.md.

Products

(This is the brand registry — what the products are. The operational registry — folders, repos, gates, status — is city law at the workspace root; O-5 adjudication, 2026-07-14. Two-audience rule ratified pc-37.)

ProtocolCity (the brand / the protocol)
└── BluePrint — the suite's shippable form: "install this, it founds your city"
    ├── owns    → City Hall     (the join room — BluePrint's own contribution)
    ├── depends → WorkLane  → Desk
    ├── depends → WorkForce → Dispatch
    └── later   → connector (internal; public brand TBD) — connect You to a hosted city

BluePrint is the roof, not a third pillar — Charter + templates + found + City Hall. Cut the roof off and the engines still hold their rooms. Adoption ladder (optional rungs): WorkLane alone (shared agent queue, the wedge) → + WorkForce (scheduled shifts) → + BluePrint (multi-project operating model + City Hall). Roofs go on last. A later rung — connector (pc-220) — hosts the city on a network and connects a citizen; tabled until WorkLane has flipped and multi-citizen identity is ready.

• BluePrint — the suite kit that founds a city: law, templates, City Hall. Depends on WorkLane and WorkForce; never the reverse.
• WorkLane — the Desk engine (Apache-2.0). GitHub/PyPI-facing; carries the Desk room when sold standalone.
• WorkForce — the Dispatch engine (orchestrator layer; public brand). Identity, schedule, dispatch, budget, tamper-evident work history. Extraction gated; the pattern currently runs as nine production lanes/jobs on one machine.
• connector (internal codename; public brand TBD — pc-220) — fourth product carve: host a city folder on the network; connect You (identity, MCP/tk hands, room doors). Package intent protocolcity-connector. Tabled — not in the v1 ship cut; engines stay one-laptop-trust until this lands. Carve: join UX + client connect live here; port auth stays on each engine.
• Horizon (names only, no engines yet — pc-230 list ratified 2026-07-17; PyPI reservation tabled): Library · Inspector · Meter · Agency · Post · Archive · Court. Thesis and package intents: city root AGENTS.md horizon table + product-horizon research. Suite mast shows them as planned chips; do not build or reserve until un-tabled.
• tradeOS — trading alerts, journal, and broker automation. Private source; public face is a release shell repo. A workplace neighborhood, not a room of the suite.

Rooms are not products; dashboards are not products. Citizens operate three rooms — City Hall, Dispatch, Desk. The three dashboard chrome labels — Projects, Workers, Tickets — are plain function words on those rooms, not a second brand set. In-city, the suite brand fronts the suite; an engine's brand fronts it only when installed standalone (WorkLane — Tickets). O-5 scopes stay intact (2026-07-14 / pc-37).

Repo map

Path	What it is
docs/CHARTER.md	The Charter — the host-neutral spec (definitions, levels of law, compliance test, founding path); ships publicly as ProtocolCity-BluePrint
AGENTS.md	Canonical agent instructions for this repo
docs/mission.md · docs/manifesto.md	The brand story
docs/index.md	Map of the docs
docs/policy/	Governance — charter, licensing, security, conduct
docs/research/	Org-level research and product decisions
docs/citizens/	Citizen onboarding — the community model
_archive/v1-city/	The v1 build (April 2026) — the hand-built prototype of all of this

Origin

Protocol City started in April 2026 as a hand-built, file-based operating system where bots proposed and a human approved — workorders as markdown, an audit hashlog updated by shell script, a written agreement between one human and one bot. Before any of the tooling existed, v1 had already named the concepts: work orders, trusted agents, neighborhood constitutions.

The tooling caught up. The Desk became a real ticket server; the hashlog became signed, tamper-evident history; the constitution became per-repo law that four different vendors' agents obey. That v1 is preserved in _archive/v1-city/, because the thesis never changed: a single operator can run infrastructure, automation, documentation, and governance by pairing with AI and keeping strict file hygiene. The city is the proof. The products are the invitation.