I was trying to think about where to start here, and I think it’s worth listing a few different things we can all agree on as failures, to establish some common ground.
- ZOMG has lost a valuable participant because she came to believe that the current environment wouldn’t let her pursue the goals that motivated her to join.
- The unexpected intensity of pushback drove away an advocate for goals we all pretty much share, indicating a problem with our receptivity to advocates for these goals.
- An applicant that is making exactly the kind of thing ZOMG basically exists to fund (Aditya at Zecwallet) is either turning down or very wary of receiving funding from ZOMG.
- The gender balance on the committee was already out of step with best practices, and now there is no gender balance on the committee.
There are probably other things I’m missing, but I’ve tried to just make a list of things we can all point to and recognize would ideally be happening and aren’t:
- Sarah ideally would still be with us.
- Staunch advocates for access, privacy/security standards, and procedural transparency (to paraphrase Sarah’s goals) would ideally feel welcome, even (or especially) if they are sticklers.
- Aditya would be funded to work on Zecwallet and expand his team, and whatever strings came attached to that funding would be welcome, as a seal-of-approval for example, and not a burdensome hassle, and the sincerity and achievableness of this intention would be clear to him and all other applicants (because it is both sincere and achievable.)
- We wouldn’t have a panel that failed to be diverse on almost every important axis.
I think in all of these cases there’s a widely-shared intent about what we want to accomplish together, but it’s breaking down in practice.
Soo… let’s figure out why.
I think the key to this is emotions, and that while we’re having this conversations in a written online medium where the words are clear, the emotions that drive our decisions are completely opaque to each other or even ourselves, and that there are always unseen factors acting on our emotions. (This is like, the epitaph to 2020, or the “lasciate ogne speranza” written on the gate to the Internet.)
As far as my bringing up sexism goes, yes, Sarah chose to focus not on sexism but on what she sees as the clear strategic problem for Zcash. But when there are goals we all share, and a list of failures putting those goals into practice like the one above, including a clear gender imbalance that itself came from a broader set of factors, I think it would be really silly to not name sexism as a candidate for one of the invisible influences on our emotional states that might be derailing us from achieving our goals. So let’s name it. This doesn’t mean we have to exile anyone. It just means talking about it and a shared willingness to talk about it.
Of all the things in this list we can do to address this, the gender balance on the committee seems like the most obvious starting point, and something we’ll regret not fixing the next time this comes up, which it will. I’m flexible about how we do it but also certain it should be settled soon. It doesn’t have to involve guilt, or dramatic sacrifice, or unfairness. I’m actually happy to leave if anyone else objects to the “draw straws” approach—out of pragmatism and a clear sense of what needs to happen, not guilt—and I promise I’ll stay involved either way in the course of my work on Zbay. I considered this after the election; it’s not just a reactive thing. It doesn’t have to happen immediately either, and probably wouldn’t since an election would take some time. But if there are other ideas to open up space for gender balance soon while keeping control in the hands of voters on the CAP we can pursue those ideas too.
I know we don’t want to lose yet another ZOMG member that the community chose. But one way to look at this is that the lack of diversity on the committee will itself become (or has already become) a barrier to attracting the best candidates. I’m a great data point, as someone chosen by the CAP who would not have run for a non-diverse panel.
The other thing that seems fixable, if Aditya/Zecwallet is willing, is to find some mutual understanding there. I think I understand Zecwallet’s concerns about ZOMG funding, but I need to understand them better, and I suspect Aditya’s model of our concerns might be closer to his worst fears about us than to our actual concerns, if that makes sense. Also, I think whatever happens this experience will focus ZOMG’s attention intensely on the importance of being understood by grantees—who are understandably in a stressful and vulnerable position waiting for our decision. I take responsibility for a lapse in attention to this on my part, partly because I didn’t realize that what we were communicating could be interpreted as bad news. Feeling intensely in this moment how much of a slog it can be to put these complex ideas in writing, with no sense of how it’s being received and no emotional read on anyone (yikes) I’m inclined to bring voice communication into the process, though maybe that’s a bad idea and I need to think about it more.
To retain perspective, I think we should remember that building a decentralized, private currency, building the institutions around it, and building an effective grant-making entity from a democratic process and part-time labor are all very hard things to do, so we should forgive these stumbles.
We should also remember that all organizations have similar problems, but they try to best to hide them and often succeed to a degree.
We’re letting them be public to decentralize power and that’s hard, but also good.