Can We Reopen the ZCAP Volunteer Form in Light Of the Upcoming Vote?

Governance
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Given this recent blog post and this statement:

With hindsight, it’s possible that we should have put greater effort into publicising the fact that we were inviting nominations.

And the fact that the solicitation for community members to nominate themselves for ZCAP was wrapped up in the same blog post that could have been better publicized can we also consider reopening ZCAP nominations?

How many submissions did the ZF actually receive from forum members via this form?

Had I seen this I would have volunteered via the form. I am active in support of Zcash on Twitter (@allyourbank), Reddit (wobbzz), and I was also a Powers of Tau participant.

@Dodger @amiller @secparam @amber @Matthewdgreen @valkenburgh

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Not my call at least directly, but my gut instinct is this is a bad idea. The entire point of having a separate period for ZCAP membership additions and a vote is precisely to ensure the people voting in the election have been in the community for a while. Open it up now and we could just get brigading.

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I understand that. The caveat for the form submission was that:

Anyone who has been a member of the forums since before March 2020 may volunteer

I’m not proposing we modify that stipulation. But I do think simply reopening the form with the same stipulation in place would make sense.

Edit: forgot to hit reply to @secparam

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I’ve never heard about this form but I have received an invite from a current member. However, it was after the closing date and it was rejected.

In view of the incoming vote, I’d also suggest we reopen invites.

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Ya know there was a thread Ideas for expanding ZCAP
You don’t (or didn’t at least) need to be invited, the ZFND could admit long standing members at it’s discretion via the link to the form right there in the article that came two weeks before (one month ago) deadline which isn’t all that insignificant of a window. I can’t say whether it should or shouldn’t be re-opened, I dont have the information but, again, the door swings both ways and you can’t shell off quite all of the blame here.

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(Context: I take the ZCAP seriously. In fact, I once relinquished my position on the panel because there was a similiar situation once before; someone thought it unfair or something and so (and this should be in the git history) I stepped off because I sympathized with this person as the non-voting community with the understanding that ultimately it didn’t really matter so long as I spoke my mind about the zips in question to my satisfaction (and I did too :fist:). Then I got re-invited in the following round :person_frowning:)

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I’m inclined to agree. The ZCAP has open periods once per year already, simply because someone wasn’t paying attention when they announced the opening and closing period isn’t a good reason to change the precedent.

Imagine if everytime the ZFND publishes notice that they are going to poll ZCAP for something they opened it? It’s a situation where users can see the upcoming questions and choose people to invite that they feel will vote thier way on that particular topic rather than based on thier participation in the community.

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TLDR: It is an exceptional case.

I would generally agree with you on this matter. Rules shouldn’t change when it is convenient for some.

However, I think this time is special because of the incoming NU-5 upgrade. It is my strong conviction that the zcash dev community is not ready to contribute to post-halo zcash in the way that has been discussed. As NU-5 removes the need for the Multi-Party Ceremony, we are looking forward to ZSA, sharding, smart contracts, etc.

All of this is possible. In fact, other teams, for other coins, have implemented them. I’m closely following Mina Protocol and they have made great progress. They even started from Halo.

Yet, it seems to me that the zcash community lacks core developers. There are app & web developers but not much ongoing contribution to protocol/core. Before NU-5, one can argue that we couldn’t because most changes would require a new MPC.

Now, we have a vision post NU-5 (see ECC official post) but who is actually going to materialize it?

The ECC protocol core team is excellent but very short-staffed. I think it’s fair to say that ZF hasn’t delivered much code yet.

I have been involved in several projects and the successful ones are excellent at balancing theory (crypto & protocol) and practice (code).

We are looking towards the ZOMG to fill the gap via grants. I don’t see how in the current situation.

Therefore, I’m afraid that when NU-5 lands, it will look like some piece of alien tech from a far more advanced civilization.

I believe this is the calm before the storm. We should use it as well as possible to improve the ECC/ZF/ZOMG and hit the ground running.

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I’m neutral on it though I don’t think we’re less ready for Halo than we were for Blossom and (just as a personal observation) it’s interesting because Dr. Valkenberg (:nerd_face:) used that same alien adjective in his ‘Its time to zero knowledge all the things’ piece talking about Zcash up until now.

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I understand the logic behind your thought process here and appreciate your response. Some thoughts I have:

  1. I hope that one day we can all stop feeling like the first thing we have to consider around these parts is what if this is a biased scheme. I still have no idea what I would do IF I made it on the ZCAP before the vote IF the vote happens. My desire to join ZCAP is impartial to @aquietinvestor’s request. As I told him in community chat, no matter what happens I hope he sticks around and I appreciate his tough questions.
  2. No matter what happens I’ll still be here supporting ZEC and will catch the next go around. I simply wish I would have saw it. I come from a simple mining and investing background and for the longest time have not understood how I can contribute considering I’m a FTE with children and some tech skills. Did not think I could simply apply because I have been around these parts since before 2020. So I saw this information, applied logic, and decided to ask.

Cheers all.

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Absolutely right! I have seen this notification in twitter-account at least twice, saw the topic on the forum, saw it on the Zcash Foundation website, even saw tweets @tm3k about this. I even filled out the form. Guys, don’t make this precedent.

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I’d like to add that I too did receive and review the invite and even discussed with two individuals to get on board ZF, but they declined the invite due to insufficient bandwidth.

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Yeah I completely missed that post, and the email about expanding the CAP.

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Theres nothing stopping anyone from emailing the ZFND a nomination be it a ZCAP invite or for themselves. Whether they’ll consider accepting it idk but then at least its in there, the ZFND is planning on polling the ZCAP soon (mid-August).

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I did that last week, asked by email if It could use my unspent invite…the answer was no as the deadline has passed.

It’s unfortunate, but the rules are what they are and it’s not a surprise, it will just take longer for the person I invited to join.

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We are not going to re-open the ZCAP invite/volunteer window before the upcoming consultation.

The expansion of the ZCAP was announced in a blog post, we tweeted about it, emailed all the current ZCAP members, and I talked about it during the opening and closing sessions of Zcon2. During the window, 24 existing ZCAP members invited someone new, and ten eligible forum members joined.

Once this consultation is done, we’ll be reviewing the ideas that are being collected on this forum thread, so please post any suggestions you have there.

We will definitely be expanding the ZCAP again in the future. We just need to make sure that we do it in a way that is fair, consistent, resistant to Sybil attacks, and allows us plenty of time to adequately review new members before polls.

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