dtpr

Readme

Table of Contents

Introduction to Digital Trust for Places and Routines (DTPR)

The Design System

Taxonomy

Visual Language

Data Chain

How to Use DTPR

Original Co-Design Session Materials

Governance

History

License

Introduction to Digital Trust for Places and Routines (DTPR)

Digital Trust for Places and Routines (DTPR) is an open-source communication standard designed to increase the legibility and transparency of data, sensors and AI in the built environment.

We believe that by first enabling transparency and understanding, we can increase accountability and human agency so that there can be community trust in digital technology.

DTPR is a design system that reveals key elements of the technologies of our public spaces and our built environment, including who manages them, what their purpose is and what kind of data is collected or processed through them. Communities use DTPR to provide visibility and legibility for what are often invisible technologies, enabling a communication and feedback pathway between someone moving through a physical space that has technologies that collect data, use sensors and AI, and the technology’s manager.

DTPR originated as a collaborative design initiative and is an open-source project, available to all under the Creative Commons license CC BY 4.0.

The Design System

The DTPR design system consists of a standardized data dictionary and structure that describe digital technology and data governance practices, and an associated set of icons and usage patterns designed to quickly and clearly communicate those concepts.

Taxonomy

The core component of the DTPR open-source communication standard is the taxonomy, a structured way to organise and standardise the definition of key concepts and terms related to digital technology and data governance. These concepts include the type of technology, its purpose, the accountable entity, and data collected. The categories of information were identified as essential by the privacy and responsible technology experts who were part of DTPR’s original development process in 2019.

Visual Language

A visual language of icons, associated shapes & colours, and accompanying text & QR codes form the "alphabet" of the system that is DTPR.

The latest version of the taxonomy and its corresponding icons can be directly downloaded from dtpr.io/taxonomy. Simply right-click on the icons and choose to save them on your computer to access them.

Data Chain

The Data Chain is a hierarchical information model that uses the taxonomy to present detailed information about a technology in a consistently structured way; one could consider this the “nutrition label” component of the DTPR design system.

How to Use DTPR

To accompany the downloadable assets in this GitHub repository, the DTPR Standard Guide was created to assist those looking to deploy this open-source standard in public spaces by explaining how the standard works, and the underlying research and rationale for its design.

Claude Code plugin

A Claude Code plugin ships in this repository under plugin/dtpr/. It bundles two agent skills (describing an AI system as a DTPR datachain; brainstorming the DTPR taxonomy itself) and auto-registers the remote DTPR MCP at https://api.dtpr.io/mcp.

Install with:

/plugin marketplace add Helpful-Places/dtpr
/plugin install dtpr

See plugin/dtpr/README.md for the skill summaries and troubleshooting notes.

Original Co-Design Session Materials

The DTPR standard was created through an open development process, including co-design and consultation sessions with global experts and with the general public. The materials and facilitation guide created to run those co-design sessions can be found here.

Governance

The standard is currently stewarded by Helpful Places, a social impact enterprise based in Toronto, Canada.