(emphasis mine)
Everyone here probably agrees in abstract terms that it’s not appropriate to rush making changes, but I don’t think what’s being proposed by @cburniske and @aquietinvestor should be seen as rushing.
ZOMG took some time to identify these problems and discuss them internally. @cburniske took some time to write them up. We’re taking some time to discuss proposed language here, in a public process, and if this language went on the ballot, ZCAP voters would have a few weeks to discuss them.
One of the changes, pay people for up to 5 hours per week instead of up to 1.5, is a pretty small and probably uncontroversial adjustment. Some ZOMG members didn’t take compensation at all, and many will likely not spend 5 hours each and every week, so the increase could be much less than the theoretical maximum of 4x.
And the other change, allowing the ZOMG to use its funds to hire support staff at market rates determined by ZF, is something we’re currently already doing, except that the money is coming out of ZF’s budget instead of ZOMG’s budget, and ZF ran the hiring process instead of ZOMG (though ZOMG is likely to accept ZF’s help in running the hiring process as long as it seems like it’s going well.)
Neither of these seem like big changes. And voting on them in this cycle would certainly not be a rush.
And if the voters feel it’s a rush, or they aren’t convinced that these changes are a good idea, that’s that and they won’t happen.
I can see where @Dodger wants to say “let’s try the existing ZF-based solutions now before changing the ZIP,” but usually when there’s a process problem it makes sense to open up parallel tracks to solving it rather than trying to solve it serially. This is especially true when one of the solutions is naturally bound to an annual election cycle. If the ZF-based steps don’t work for whatever reason, we don’t want ZOMG to be stuck in the same situation until next year, without enough capacity to increase the flow of qualified applicants, or verify that the work of existing grantees was executed well. Things move too fast in the crypto space to spend a year without the capacity to do outreach well, and community trust is too important to go another year without the capacity to do milestone review well.
I actually think it’s likely that the steps ZF has taken will address these capacity problems, and that the new people joining will be awesome, but I think it’s overconfident to be 100% sure that this will be the case. There’s always risk associated with new hires, and it’s a tricky management situation where the new hires will be receiving requests from ZOMG, ZF, and potentially different people within those organizations. In the case where it doesn’t work out, I believe the community will be best served by giving ZOMG the power to fix the situation themselves. Voting this year on the proposal from @aquietinvestor does that. In @Dodger’s proposal, ZOMG would have to work through ZF to address the problem, propose a ZIP for voting next year, or wait until the next election. In this case such a delay would be harmful, so it’s better to give the ZOMG power to do this now.
UPDATE: I posted a broken-down estimate of my own ZOMG hours here, if anyone is interested. It worked out (awkwardly) to 20 hours/month: Notes on time commitments for ZOMG members