Activity & excitement
What a busy week it's been.
Lots of activity with the Shock the Web hackathon, which brought a lot of new people into the community, ready to build things. Plus, there were some really good talks around Lightning, the ecosystem, and building apps for it. Would love to get my hands dirty with a Lightning app someday. My workshop gave me a chance to demo the guide and Bitcoin UI Kit in a really practical way by going through a sample design exercise (designing a simple Lighting tip jar). I hope some of the hackathon teams end up using it. The hackathon continues through the weekend and I'll try to help support teams when I can.
It's a lot of work to keep the kit in sync with the guide as it has roughly 300 screen mockups now. I am getting close, so I can next focus on creating how-to videos and helping onboard designers in better ways. There was also discussion around more tightly integrating the kit with the guide, making it more of an "official community project". Would be super cool to make it more collaborative. So far, no-one has really shown interest in contributing and I still think we have a workflow problem with design tools just generally not supporting open collaboration. It all requires a lot of manual non-obvious steps right now. Hopefully design tools will evolve more in a direction where public, open collaboration is the default (or at least a normalized workflow).
Somehow, many other calls also piled up this week. One with a young designer from Nigeria who wants to start contributing, another session on feedback on the design guide, a small design session and a larger project call on the JoinMarket UI, a new member mixer, a community call, and a call with someone who runs a bitcoin accelerator program. And I missed a few like a Learning Bitcoin and Design session, and a Bitcoin Developers stream. Lots of great opportunities to connect people, projects, and ideas.
Some other good things happened and a few small project ideas and initiatives popped up. People just seemed really excited and full of energy this week. Very cool to see.
Next Thursday, I'll be off to Portugal for Offscript, a conference for Web3 creatives where I'll do a presentation on Open Design. Not really sure what to think of the term Web3 at the moment, but I'm excited to discuss open design with a group of designers from the broader crypto world. I'm sure there's a lot we can learn from each other.
In April, I really need to get very hands-on with another initiative that has been brewing in the background. No clue how that will turn out, but I'm very excited for it.
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