@mlphresearch brought up some questions to me privately about the authorities/differences of various parties in this proposal and I just thought I’d share here what I shared with him to clarify if there is any confusion.
The trust, the ZF Grant Review Committee, the ZF Board, and the ECC Board are all distinct entities with different members.
The trust is really meant to be “set and forget” and the trustees are only meant to validate that the ECC/ZF are meeting their accountability requirements before disbursement. Their purpose is to validate what can’t be validated on-chain, and to do so in a straightforward way. By virtue of the trust they will be legally restricted on how they can disburse those funds. Think of the trust as a “dumb” smart contract, in a way.
The ZF Grant Review Committee itself will function as part of the Foundation, but with explicit authority over all grant funding from the Foundation (aka the 40% of the fund earmarked for ZF Grants). If this proposal is adopted I expect the Foundation will change the bylaws to reflect this to provide legal backing for the Grant Review Committee’s authority…but even without that change the transparency requirements to the trust will dictate that the Foundation follow through on this promise or face themselves getting defunded.
The ZF Board remains unchanged from my proposal, and remains the ultimate authority for the Zcash Foundation…much like the ECC Board remains unchanged, and is the ultimate authority for the ECC’s internal governance. The ZF Board, like most 501(c)(3)s, has a self-selecting board (board members vote for new members). We previously used an advisory panel to guide the selection of new board members (for Ian and Amber in 2018) and I suspect we’d do something similar again in the future…but it’s at the ZF board’s discretion.