AstroLog PIR®
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One kit, one footer, every door: Foyers in groups, a gratitude pledge, and proposals in the open

MediumGitHub home & brand 4 min readBy Christopher W
TL;DR: Every PIR® page on GitHub now runs the same arrival kit (1.4) as the other organizations, with nothing patched on top. Donate and the welcome guide are in every footer, the More dropdown and the Menu; the footer has one clean shape everywhere; the Foyers and the helpdesks open in groups (Committees, then Infrastructure), with the GSR Desk and BoardDesk's own front door. New: a gratitude pledge with no money in it, a proposals page (the first: safeguards so the domain's bill can't sneak up again), a resources page, and a "Looking for the helpdesk?" door at the top of every foyer.
What visitors get →

🧭 Finding your way

  • The Foyers dropdown (it used to say “Committees”) lists the nine committees in the order the fellowship reads them (GSR, PR, TechCom, LitCom, Newspaper, Publications, Book, the Board, Intergroup), then the three infrastructure desks (WordPress, GitHub home & brand, A.L.E.X.), each under a small heading. Long lists scroll instead of running off the screen.
  • The Helpers dropdown and every desk’s Helpdesks dropdown do the same: committee desks first (GSR, PR, TechCom, LitCom, BoardDesk), then the infrastructure desks. BoardDesk opens its own front door now, not an empty repository.
  • Every foyer opens with “Looking for the helpdesk?”: the desk that takes that committee’s requests (Newspaper goes to PR, Publications and Book to LitCom, Intergroup to GSR, WordPress to TechCom), and an “Every helpdesk” link beside it.
  • Every desk portal ends with “Looking for another desk?”, a row of doors to the others, and its “Open PIR’s Discord” button is easier to see in both lights.
  • Donate and the welcome guide are always there: in the footer, the More dropdown and the Menu, on the hub, the AstroLog, A.L.E.X. and every desk. (Before, the desks’ footers and every Menu were missing the guide.)
  • One footer shape: the page’s name on a row of its own, then the links in balanced columns across the full width, the same as on every other organization’s pages. No more three groups and one stranded below.
  • On a phone, the strip at the bottom shows when it scrolls: a soft fade and a small arrow on the side with more.

🤲 A gratitude pledge, with no money in it

The pledge is a way to say thank you to the fellowship in writing, signed with a crypto wallet. PIR® is self-supporting under its traditions and declines outside contributions, so the pledge asks for nothing and sends nothing: signing is a message, not a payment, it’s checked in your browser and then forgotten, and the page never shows a count. A tool on the same page checks any pledge’s signature. The pledge’s words are a first draft, open to the fellowship’s suggestions. Giving with crypto stays off.

🧾 Receipts and taxes

The donate page now says how to ask for a receipt, and PIR’s status in PIR’s own words: a registered 501(c)(3) organization, as the main site’s footer states. Whether a gift is tax-deductible depends on your own situation; the page doesn’t claim more.

💡 Proposals and resources

  • Proposals writes out ideas put to the Board and committees, each marked as a proposal until they decide. The first: SiteGround auto-renewal safeguards, an org-owned card, two account holders, reminders, auto-renew with a backup card, a registrar lock and written-down logins, so the domain and DNS bill can’t sneak up on anyone again. It’s for the Board and TechCom; nothing has been decided. The Intergroup proposals shelf is listed beside it.
  • Resources gives the resource shelf its own address, with the by-laws, the contacts and the privacy policy on top.
  • The AstroLog’s porch has a share card of its own (the map used to show the hub’s picture twice), and so do the GSR Desk, BoardDesk, the pledge, proposals and resources.
  • “Expand all” no longer shows on write-ups with nothing to expand (it looked broken there), and works on a write-up with a single folded section.
  • A few links that went nowhere now land: the assets walkthrough (now in the Gallery), the Election Committee’s first intake address (it forwards to the entry), and two “by-laws hub” links.

🌱 Keeping it going

The roadmap and sustainability pages (here, on the hub and on every desk) now say plainly that one person holds most of the keys today, and how that changes: two owners for PIR’s GitHub organization, publishing through the organization’s own automation instead of personal tokens, a register of every token and when it expires, a renewal runbook, hand-over steps and backups. They also explain the shared wallet-connect project, and the one-line change that would give PIR its own.