#69 Human Rights Kit

Triangles or circles?

This is an update for the last weeks. The big thing that just happened is that, last night, the Human Rights Foundation announced a bounty of 2 bitcoin for porting the Bitcoin UI Kit from Figma to Penpot - from a proprietary tool to an open-source one that should allow us to collaborate in a much more open and fluent way. Sounds simple, but it’s not. Architecting a design system is quite intricate, and mock-ing up 300 screens across many user flows is a lot of work. Then there’s the educational aspect of bringing designers and developers along, adjusting to the strengths and weaknesses of Penpot, etc. We had a kick-off call this morning that went great, we have a good group of people, and I’m excited to see how it will all unfold. The project tracker issue is here.

Speaking of project tracking, I spent a decent amount of time setting up design milestones for the Bitcoin Core App. Goal is to quickly and efficiently design the whole application, ahead, and slightly independent, of the development progress. The design docs website now lists all the milestones, we have matching milestones and milestone tracker issues in GitHub, matching pages in Figma, and they are all consistently named and cross-linked. I am also porting the design explorations still over and will see updating all the docs accordingly. This should be a rock-solid interconnected structure for the design process. This train will keep moving.

As for the Bitcoin Design Foundation, we are looking into an alternative route via Open Collective. Via fiscal sponsorship, we may be able to get things up and running with limited legal, tax, and accounting overhead. It would have been amazing to set up something custom. But dealing with paperwork for months and barely making progress has been frustrating. Calling up bank after bank and being told that they don’t support what we do (primarily about having non-Germans be involved with association accounts - nothing to do with bitcoin) was also not fun. That direction was worth investigating, but even if we got it running, it would be very far from ideal. With Open Collective, we have to trust the fiscal host and it has a cost, but it would really give us a great foundation and limit our overhead to allow us to focus on fundraising and grant-giving. Can’t believe something like this is so complicated to set up on your own (at least in Germany). There’s more homework to do, so let’s see.

Saving Satoshi chapter 4 is moving forward. This has been a tough one to pin down, due to all the cryptography and coding involved. But I think this iteration is close.

Chapter 3 is in heavy development and I’m excited to see that take shape.

There’s lots of other stuff going on, much of it covered in the latest newsletter. Spiral also released their quarterly update, always inspiring what’s going on there.

I’ll be traveling next week and will be a bit on and off. I also need to figure out which two weeks of August I’ll take off for vacation. That’s coming up quickly, and I really need to take a bit of time off to chill, hang out with family, and re-energize.

🍭