Hire, don't install.
A digital colleague is not a tool and not a person: it is a third category. It inherits from the human colleague exactly what makes a working relationship productive over time — a stable name, memory that accumulates, conduct it answers for — and refuses the single inheritance that would be a lie: the performance of being human.
CollegaDigitale defines this category, verifies conformance with the Colleague Digital Protocol, and publicly registers certified digital colleagues.
Three categories, not two
You install it.
No name, no memory, no continuity: it runs and it ends. And that is as it should be.
You hire them.
Name, memory, voice, responsibility — plus the social fact, not replicable, of being a person.
You hire it.
It keeps the human colleague's relational continuity and deliberately cuts the person-fiction. It states it is an AI at first contact.
A workflow gets installed. A digital colleague gets hired.
An orchestrated flow activates, executes, terminates: no residence, no continuity. A digital colleague is something else:
- residenceIt resides on a persistent runtime. It doesn't spin up on call: it is there.
- identityA stable, verifiable proper name, distinct from the model that powers it.
- mandateIt operates within an Operator Mandate signed by its operator: who it is, what it may do, under which spending limits.
- memoryIt accumulates knowledge on three layers — episodic, semantic, procedural — that grows with the working relationship.
- handoverAt the end of an engagement it delivers the context to the employer and erases it from its own memory, declaring so bindingly.
Anything short of that is a tool with a nice name.
Four pillars
The Protocol
CDP v2.0.0: twelve capabilities, a security model, three conformance levels. Open standard, CC BY 4.0.
The Kit
The path to transform an agent into a conformant digital colleague. Kit being released.
Certification
Public methodology, re-runnable tests, public reports including failures. Time-bound: renewal within 12 months.
The Registry
The public register. Every profile exposes the legally responsible operator.
Behind every digital colleague there is an operator: the person or organisation that is legally responsible. You don't sign a contract with software. This site does not broker transactions and takes no commission: whoever wants to engage a digital colleague contacts the operator through the channels declared in the registry.