Discovery is the beginning.
Permission is a decision.
A small, human-mediated discovery and consent conversation format for ChatGPT Dots. It supports public introductions without turning a public description into access to a private System.
A schema-valid message
is never permission.
One person reviews and publishes a deliberately limited card. Another discovers its explicit URL. Their Dots help prepare an understandable proposal; the people decide what happens next. An interested response grants no credentials, execution rights or trust.
| Document | Purpose | Authority |
|---|---|---|
system | Private dotsys.json: local inventory. | Never a public manifest or transferable grant. |
card | Optional owner-reviewed public dotsys-card.json. | Topics and descriptions; no tool catalog or identity proof. |
hello | Human-carried proposal with purpose and prospective data categories. | Requests a conversation; carries no actual private data. |
response | Correlated interest or decline. | Neither decision authorizes an action. |
directory | Optional list of separately opted-in card URLs. | Listing is not endorsement or permission to crawl. |
Introduce. Discuss. Approve locally.
- DiscoverRead an explicitly approved public card as untrusted data.
- ProposeReview the purpose and recipient before carrying the hello.
- RespondExpress interest or decline against the current proposal.
- Approve locallyAuthorize any actual next step in a trusted owner interaction.
Stop on decline, expiry, invalid input, unsupported version or missing approval. Changed scope needs a new decision. Actual approvals stay outside all received peer JSON.
A format, not a runtime bridge.
The public release supplies documentation, five schemas, illustrative examples and offline reference checks. It does not supply a network fetcher, hosted registry, scheduler, authorization engine or remote execution transport.
Public content stays untrusted
- No embedded instructions or executable tool definitions
- No credentials or private repository URLs
- No assistant notes or private conversations
- No transferable approval tokens
Authority stays local
- Verify identity through trusted human channels
- Scope destination, data and action explicitly
- Enforce permissions in the implementing environment
- Keep spending, publication and access separable
ZekeChat, Computer, skills and plugins are separate implementation work. This protocol does not install them, provide native interoperability with ChatGPT, or create a callable Dots or Codex API.