Hello 
@ariannasimpson and @JacobPPhillips welcome!
Thank you for your proposal! I agree with maintaining 20% of the block reward but I have strong concerns regarding the council and a centralized voting system to manage funds.
Why?
- it creates a single point of failure and increases centralization
- it’s likely to result in more bureaucracy and internal politics and create a point of separation between the Community and ECC and ZFND
- It’s another entity requiring funding, unless the elected 3 seats are voluntary roles, which I’m firmly against due to the scope and importance of the role
I’m also concerned that:
- the pain-points raised by external developers are not addressed in this proposal, leaving a high barrier to entry to work on the ZEC codebase. I see this as a central issue which
directly inhibits the network effects mentioned in your post. - this proposal does not provide a roadmap to decentralization. It may solve short-term concerns, but it does not provide a long-term strategic roadmap.
- the creation of a council would have to be preceded by the development of a voting process and a system of governance by which this ‘council’ would also be held accountable to.
- a 3-seat council voted-in by ZEC-holders has a high risk-factor for malpractice, especially considering the participatory nature of a voting system and the existing (and justified) skepticism regarding turnout of a critical mass of voters (I see this as a weakness in my proposal as well and am working on a separate article to address it)
My takeaways:
- I standby reinforcing the existing ZFND (and other existing community entities) with more robust systems and processes for governance in order to meet the growing needs of the network as ZEC gains adoption.
- I’d rather that the community focus on reaching consensus for accountability metrics (both for ECC and ZFND) which should guide most (if not all) decision-making by the community. (and should be the focus of review every 6-12 months, perhaps)
- All proposals which maintain 20% of miner’s rewards should have some sort of strategy or roadmap for decentralization.
Disclosure: my proposal does suggest the creation of a few specified ‘boards’ or ‘committees’ but these are ancillary groups/individuals which help to assist ZFND with aspects of the proposal which I felt required a specialized skill-set (i.e. a fund manager for traditional market assets for the proposed ‘Developers’ Endowment Fund’). However, these specialized entities are meant to be part of ZFND either as full-time or part-time employees.