The Fork Protocol defines what every Bits&Bytes fork must preserve, what it must adapt, and how to tell the difference. Read this before you touch anything with the Bits&Bytes name on it.
A fork is not a branch office. It's not a licensed chapter. It's a local instantiation of the same idea — get teens building and shipping publicly — running on its own in its own city.
The network is strong because every fork is genuinely local. The brand holds because every fork respects the same floor.
These are not guidelines. They are hard constraints. Any fork that drifts from these stops being a Bits&Bytes fork.
Code of Conduct — reproduced exactly as written. No edits, no paraphrasing, no local amendments. The canonical CoC lives at gobitsnbytes.org/coc.
Founders section — names, roles, and descriptions exactly as given. This is not yours to rewrite.
Terminology — the words you use shape how people understand the network.
Teen-led, ships publicly — the two non-negotiable operating conditions. If either disappears, the fork is no longer a fork.
A fork that looks and feels identical to every other fork has failed. Local identity is not optional decoration — it's the point.
Visual identity — borrow from your city. Its colors, its textures, its energy. A fork from Prayagraj should feel different from one from Chennai. If you could swap city names and nothing else would change, you haven't gone far enough.
Events and programming — define what building means in your context. Your city has different schools, different industries, different access to resources. Design accordingly.
Voice and copy — write like a person from your city, not like a startup from San Francisco.