Hi Zcash,
Plain Ol’ Sunny / formerly Sunny @ Birdcalls here with a general update and a question.
Who I am: I was one of the first biohackers before it was cool, then before it was embarrassing, then before it was just a bunch of techbros buying weird peptides. At the Biocurious biology-oriented hackerspace, we used to use a $30 sonic jewelry cleaner from Walmart to transfect cells with new DNA. For the sake of citizen science genetic engineering, I led the team that put the first open-source, affordable bioreactor instructions into the world. Later on I helped write the by-laws for another biohackerspace, Counter Culture Labs. But for the last several years, I’ve moved away from biology to focus on my other expertise: privacy & security.
Who we are: During the pandemic, I led a team that built an end-to-end encrypted video conferencing platform that featured fully anonymous call creation, call time limits, and screenshot blocking. That was Birdcalls. Our major social goal was to normalize the concept of screenshot blocking. When we started the company in 2020, screenshot blocking was considered gauche; associated only with protecting nudes on Snapchat; even considered an indicator of incompetence in an engineering team. But now in 2025, screenshot blocking has been implemented as a feature across the entire landscape of telecom companies from Signal to Microsoft Teams.
So, mission accomplished. Now my team is on to something new. I’m wondering if the new things we’re working on could be useful to Zcash, and I’m planning to bring that up in another post soon. But first, I just want to say hello and ask a first question.
Former Zcash proposals: As Birdcalls, my team and I have put in a couple of grant proposals. The first time, the price of ZEC tanked after we put in our proposal and ZCG went into hibernation mode; the Birdcalls grant was put on hold for a long time and then eventually formally rejected to get it off the docket. The second grant was more complicated. People I talked to were frustrated by hostile commenters in the Zcash forum. People told me they were worried that hostile commenters were making ZCG so toxic that there might be good teams who were thinking about submitting grant proposals who then checked out the forum, decided against it, and instead silently walked away. But it was difficult for the Zcash community to address that problem unless the problem got articulated publicly in the forum. Voicing complaint is the first step to making change. I decided that I was willing to take the heat of being the one to speak up. And, whew! I took heat alright! 
But I’m hopeful that it was worth it. I’ve been told that partially as a result of me speaking up, ZCG is now more attentive to prospective grantees being trolled and works with moderators to ensure discussions stay constructive so that grantees feel comfortable participating. I hope that less hostility in the forum has translated to higher-quality grant proposals and completed projects.
So for today, my question to you is: What do you think? Do you think the forum is a better place for prospective grantees to post and discuss their proposals? How has it changed? Is moderation effective?