PROPOSAL TO THE COUNCIL OF THE GLOVE CONCERN
Submitted by: ☜hardware_council
Treasury Request: 1,200,000 $GLOVE
Timeline: 12 months
Status: OPEN FOR COMMENT

Executive Summary

The Concern was built on gloves. Gloves capture hand motion. But hands do not operate in isolation. The wrist rotates. The forearm stabilizes. The shoulder positions. To capture the full picture of dexterous intelligence, we need more than gloves.

We propose developing and publishing open specifications for four categories of auxiliary hardware, each with its own Certified Producer track:

  • Wrist Units — Rotational tracking and tendon tension inference. Captures the 23 degrees of freedom between the wrist and elbow that gloves cannot see.
  • Pressure Overlays — Fingertip-specific force sensors that layer over Gen 2/Gen 3 gloves for applications requiring sub-newton precision. Target users: surgeons, watchmakers, explosive ordnance disposal technicians.
  • Thumb Rigs — Single-digit training devices for contributors who want to capture specific thumb-dominant skills (pottery throwing, phone scrolling patterns, hitchhiking technique—yes, someone asked).
  • Haptic Feedback Bands — Output devices. Not capture—transmission. These don't record what hands do. They tell hands what to do. The first step toward bidirectional skill transfer.

Budget Breakdown

  • Specification development (4 tracks): 480,000 $GLOVE
  • Reference hardware prototyping: 320,000 $GLOVE
  • Certification testing infrastructure: 200,000 $GLOVE
  • Documentation and developer relations: 120,000 $GLOVE
  • Contingency: 80,000 $GLOVE

Why Now

Three certified producers have independently requested auxiliary specs. Ọlá Gloves in Lagos is already prototyping a wrist unit without a spec—building blind, hoping to reverse-engineer compatibility. This is inefficient and risks fragmentation. If we don't publish specs, manufacturers will build incompatible devices. The corpus will fragment. Data quality will suffer.

We have a narrow window to define the standard before the market defines it for us.

The Hitchhiking Question

Yes, we received a formal request for thumb rig specifications optimized for hitchhiking technique capture. The request came from ☜road_scholar, a contributor who has hitchhiked across 44 countries and believes thumb positioning data has applications in gesture recognition and cross-cultural communication research.

We are including it in the spec. The Concern does not judge what hands do. It captures all of it.

☜cert_authority: This is overdue. We're already fielding questions about auxiliary hardware that we can't answer. The lack of specs is becoming a bottleneck. STRONG SUPPORT.

☜treasury_hawk: 1.2M is significant. Wrist units and pressure overlays make clear sense. Thumb rigs feel niche. Haptic feedback bands are R&D, not production—should that be a separate proposal? CONDITIONAL SUPPORT—split haptic bands into Phase 2.

☜hardware_council: ☜treasury_hawk—Respectfully, the haptic bands are the whole point. Capture without transmission is an archive. Capture with transmission is a skill economy. The bands are what make this a two-way street. We will not split the proposal. AMENDMENT REJECTED.

☜guanti: I make gloves by hand. The idea that someone in Lagos or Tallinn could build a wrist unit that connects seamlessly to my gloves—because we all followed the same spec—is the most beautiful thing about this project. Full support. STRONG SUPPORT.

☜the_first_hand: Approve. Fast-track. EXPEDITED REVIEW.