Operadic categories as a natural environment for Koszul duality

This is the first paper of a series which aims to set up the cornerstones of Koszul duality for operads over operadic categories. To this end we single out additional properties of operadic categories under which the theory of quadratic operads and their Koszulity can be developed, parallel to the traditional one by Ginzburg–Kapranov. We then investigate how these extra properties interact with discrete operadic (op)fibrations, which we use as a powerful tool to construct new operadic categories from old ones. We pay particular attention to the operadic category of graphs, giving a full description of this category (and its variants) as an operadic category, and proving that it satisfies all the additional properties. Our present work provides an answer to a question formulated in Loday's last talk, in 2012: "What encodes types of operads?". In the second and third papers of our series we continue Loday's program by answering his second question: "How to construct Koszul duals to these objects?", and proving Koszulity of some of the most relevant operads.