It’s still something we’re considering! We’ve been getting our basic processes in place for accepting grants first. It was @cburniske’s idea I believe!
I ended up spending a ton of time in the forums around the Zecwallet application and Sarah’s resignation, and Zbay has had a bunch of big features that are stuck waiting for release, so I was taking a break from the forums and am just getting back into it now.
Sorry for the slow reply!
Heh, my life would be a lot chiller if this were the case! I assure you, Zbay is real!
It just isn’t that good for anything yet, because account registration and messaging is slow and unreliable. 
We’re working really hard to fix that.
Want to make a time to test it together when it’s ready?
We are way behind the timeline decided on our Zcash Foundation grant, though we’ve only been paid out for milestones completed, so we aren’t sitting on any unused / misused community funds.
A big part of the grant was for a user research project with some formal constraints, so I ended up prioritizing acting on the initial results of the research—which pointed strongly in the direction of users needing a private Slack/Discord replacement more than they needed a strictly anonymous messaging tool—rather than completing all of the formal pieces of the research specified in the milestone. Once the research laid out in the grant was underway it was clear what we needed to do, so I just focused on doing it, rather than on the grant.
And again, because the grant was focused on milestones and broken up into deliverables, ZF has only paid us for work completed.
Looking at how Zbay’s Zcash Foundation grant went is actually a great segue into answering your question.
In my own experience with ZF, I think there’s a positive and negative side to the overhead that came with the grant application process, and that in my case the positive outweighs the negative, though for other projects the balance could be different.
Positives:
- I got feedback from a leading security researcher in the grantmaking process, someone with more experience in the field than anyone on our team. (Sarah Jamie Lewis)
- This feedback helped steer us clear of ethical issues in research, and guided us towards a more systematic and rigorous approach to understanding user needs. We had done some user research, but did much more user research as a result of this feedback, and this was really helpful in getting clarity about what direction the product should go in.
- Zcash Foundation nudged us to split the grant application into clear milestones. These gave a clear upfront structure of the project and our commitments to ZF that I could refer back to.
- Paradoxically, having concrete milestones gave me more freedom than if we’d been funded up front for the whole amount with some general commitment to a set of deliverables. Once the user research started to point us in a new direction, I prioritized that new direction immediately rather than completing work on the grant.
- Having milestones made the working relationship between Zbay/me and ZF cleaner and clearer. They were happy to pay whenever the work was complete, and I was never sitting on funds for work that hadn’t been completed.
Negatives:
- Sarah’s feedback slowed down the process of getting funded by ZF, and the rigorous user research was a huge pile of work that could have been a distraction. (Though I think it was a huge net benefit).
- If we’d been dependent on ZF funds we might have been stuck working on the ZF milestones even if they weren’t the most important thing to work on. This is hypothetical because in our case we had the funds to continue work either way. But I expect ZF would have been open to changing the milestones mid-grant if that made sense. (ZOMG certainly would.)
- I’ve spent some time making sure we were fulfilling commitments to the grant application, which sometimes is a hard and slow process. Though again, that has positives sides as well.
Overall, encouraging projects to do user research, threat modeling, and security audits made my work stronger and seems like a good idea overall.
I think as far as structure and oversight goes, my guess is that it’s helpful for the default applicant, but that it might be burdensome and overwhelming for some applicants.
I’m curious what the Nighthawk folks think, since we ended up funding them, and since they’re in a similar situation to Zbay and Zecwallet. @aiyadt
I agree that it’s super important to put projects in a position where they can iterate, rather than funding “1 and done” projects.
There are other approaches to address this problem too. Funding lightwalletd infrastructure for an existing application is an easy call, since we know it will get used.
Another easy call would be work to add a feature to an existing application. Unstoppable and Zecwallet’s applications fit in this category.
I think there’s two things here that are sort of separate. One is grantwriting, like actually writing up a really “good” application and one is the work/patience to go through this process.
I don’t think we actually care that much about “grantwriting” per se at all, beyond just being able to understand what the person is proposing and the substance of what they’re proposing. If you tell us what you’re funding.
But getting 5 elected committee members to understand the substance of what you’re doing, why it makes sense, respond to their questions, and incorporate their feedback is going to be some work, especially for projects that are complex and important. They don’t have to be good at grant writing, but they do have to try to understand our questions and respond, which might take a couple rounds of back and forth. I wouldn’t call this red tape, since red tape implies kind of arbitrary technical hoops. It’s more like the inevitable communication overhead you have with a new collaborator, such as a new team member or an investor.
We’ve talked about doing this back-and-forth over phone/video calls but this can be time consuming too.
And I’m actually open to agreeing that this is too much work for some applicants, or a waste of their time.
I think the answer to your question is to have an alternate kind of grant that’s a “fellowship”. In this grant, people apply based on who they are, what they’ve done so far, and loosely based on what they intend to do. Some applicants might feel more comfortable with that, and there won’t be as much back and forth. If it was explicit that I was making the decision as to whether to fund the person and trust them, I think I’d be comfortable funding someone without completely understanding what they intended to do with the funds, based on their past track record (given a high bar for “past track record”).