Alarm bells! 🚨 re ZOMG

[zooko]

@Dodger

@zooko - I’m now asking you, as CEO of the Electric Coin Company, will you and ECC work with me, the Zcash Foundation and ZOMG, to make ZOMG a success , or are you determined to continue pushing for changes to ZIP 1014?

Dodger, I’m sorry to hear this — it sounds like you are feeling unsupported by me or by ECC. We can definitely get to the bottom of the two specific requests you mentioned below.

I was confused at first about why this thread about the future of ZOMG was perceived as having something to do with cooperation between ECC and Zfnd. Now I have a guess. I think there’s a recurring confusion in these discussions with different people talking about two different things:

1. What should Zfnd do under ZIP 1014?

2. Should the community amend or replace ZIP 1014?

(I perceive a similar pattern in this thread:

@Dodger

I do not believe that allowing ZOMG to hire its own staff is consistent with either the wording of - or the intent expressed by - ZIP 1014

)

In my post above, I was talking solely about the second topic — should the community amend or replace ZIP 1014! I try not to give others — including the Zcash Foundation — unsolicited advice about how to take care of their own business, and I support the Zcash Foundation, whom I know to be high-integrity people and whom I believe to be doing their best, starting with you, Dodger.

So please don’t interpret anything I’ve said as critical of Zfnd or as asking Zfnd to behave differently. I was talking to the Zcash community as a whole about the option of changing ZIP 1014. While ZIP 1014 constrains ECC, Zfnd, and ZOMG, it does not constrain the Zcash community! They (we, the community as a whole) can make changes to better serve the mission. And in my humble opinion, now, with a year’s worth of experience under our belts, is a great time to use what we’ve learned to make improvements.

So, to respond to your specific question:

@Dodger

@zooko - I’m now asking you, as CEO of the Electric Coin Company, will you and ECC work with me, the Zcash Foundation and ZOMG, to make ZOMG a success , or are you determined to continue pushing for changes to ZIP 1014?

I think it is a mistake to think that those are two alternative options. My intention is to do both!

1. Support Zfnd in all of their work, including their responsibility to administrate ZIP 1014, implement Zebra, and everything else that they are trying to do inasmuch as ECC can help.

2. Encourage the Zcash community to “think outside the box”, to consider making amendments to ZIP 1014 or to replace it entirely, inasmuch as I can help with that from my role of CEO of ECC.

Note that in both cases, ECC has a very limited role to play. This is by design! It’s part of the the Zcash community’s effective and resilient decentralization that ECC has only a very limited role in Zfnd’s operations and in the community’s collective decision-making.

@Dodger

Several months ago, following a discussion with ZOMG about how to go about inviting RFPs for security audits of software produced by grant recipients, I approached ECC to request introductions to suitable potential auditors. To be clear, this isn’t a request that ECC conduct audits, merely a request to make introductions to auditors who may be interested in responding to RFPs. Having commissioned multiple audits of zcashd, ECC has more and better relationships with auditors than the Foundation has, and this seemed like a fairly innocuous and trivial request.

I followed up on this internally, and it sounds like we dropped the ball. It might have been due to personnel turnover in that department around that time. In any case, we’ll follow up and get you those introductions if they’re still desired.

@Dodger

I’ve also suggested several times that Alex and I meet with the ECC leadership team to discuss how we can cooperate, for example by working together from an engineering point of view, working to identify and remove obstacles to new teams entering the Zcash ecosystem, and exploring ways to better support ZOMG’s work (e.g. by providing technical expertise and advice on how to assess grant applications and milestones).

Okay, let’s do it! We’ll organize a call and invite representatives of Zfnd leadership, and hopefully other leaders from the Zcash community if they can attend. We’ll reach out about scheduling and so on.

Dodger, I hope this clarifies that my intent in suggesting possible governance upgrades for the Zcash community as a whole was never to interfere with the Zcash Foundation’s operations, and I’m happy to support Zcash Foundation however I can going forward.