Hi, I’m taking off my hat as team lead for Birdcalls and now i’m just writing to the community as plain-ol-Sunny. I know that other people than me have expressed the opinion that the ZCG process is toxic and discouraging. But I don’t think it has to be that way forever. It could be structured differently. It could be better. So in case there’s a meta-discussion to be had here, I’m creating a space for it here.
I’ll be recusing myself from this discussion since in my capacity as team lead of Birdcalls, I’m currently an aggrieved party 
. I’ll probably also take a break from Zcash again for a while because I already feel burnt out, but I do want to reiterate that I believe in Zcash and I want y’all to be strong.
Here’s a few relevant quotes from the past week:
I think that an interesting way to think about a community forum is as a social common space where the shared resource is our ‘focused attention.’ It’s easy for forum discussions to devolve into a tragedy of the commons where our limited resource, our focused attention, is wasted.
One of my favorite thinkers on how to successfully govern social common spaces was Elinor Ostrim. She won the Nobel Prize having spent most of her life studying real world situations where communities successfully shared scarce water resources for hundreds to thousands of years, without having to resort to privatization.
Communities avoid the tragedy of the commons by taking the time and care to put in place structures to properly incentivize responsible stewardship of common resources.
Here’s the Ostrom Workshop: Ostrom Workshop: Indiana University
Who knows, maybe Zcash could hire a consultant affiliated with the Ostrom Workshop to make professional suggestions for how to better structure the ZCG program. If you want them to do that though, please please don’t make them submit it as a grant proposal to the current public forum.
I’m just tossing out a few ideas to get people thinking.
One last thing to throw out there for the discussion -
I noticed this new user account because its very first ‘like’ was my comment saying I was too tired to keep responding in the grants forum. Then I realized that the account had already read 394 posts in 1 hour of read time. I thought it was a little odd. Then I remembered that we live in a world now where it would be trivial for an LLM to be trained on the Zcash forum and then unleashed into the forums to spew mostly coherent nonsense that wastes everyone’s time and attention, forever.
In my opinion, HHIROSHIMA is a little sus.
Perhaps it’s time to add two more reputation features to community profiles: a trust graph of whether someone originally invited you into the community, if so who that was; and a badge if anyone in the community has ever met you in person.
Last thing. Now I’m putting on my hat as a privacy professional: don’t forget that the state department doesn’t have to get you delisted from the exchanges if they can just insert enough monkey wrenches into your system that you fail to function.
Okay, I’m done here for now. I’m recusing myself now. Furthermore, I’m going to turn off notifications for Zash for a while. So if anyone specifically wants a response from me then please ask Jason or Zooko to send me a ping via text.
All best,
Plain Ol’ Sunny
