Non native English speaker, i think got 95% of the message. Trying to paraphrase: it is actually not neutral to put forward people’s pronouns in today’s world.
If so, I agree with this, without having anything against anyone and their personal choices.
However, no need to put forward any ideology, religion, whatever…
Indeed, as much as it can attract some, it can refrain others from joining, therefore no longer neutral.
ZEC is politically-neutral money, available to all.
That does not mean that the community members, individuals or entities, should be neutral. In fact, we need to clearly state our values in order to bring new people into the community. If we look at other crypto communities that have gotten a lot of traction, people don’t join because they love their hashing algorithm, they join because their values align with the community’s stated values.
I think we need more statements like the one @Dodger posted here, from all the major players in the community.
I’m not at all averse to discussing ZF’s ongoing position as recipient of Devfunds, but this particular line of criticism is troubling to me.
In my view, unless you can only feel comfortable in a space in which trans/queer/non-white people can be openly discriminated against, there should not be anything off-putting about a commitment to staff diversity or offering people the ability to use their preferred pronouns. This stance is also completely mainstream within the corporate and academic world.
I have seen no evidence that the mission of ZF is anything other than what it says it is - the furtherance of decentralized privacy preserving technology. I have some questions (and to be clear they are questions, not accusations or allegations) about the specific commitment to the benefit of Zcash Holders per se, but none whatsoever about the broad objectives of ZF. In my interactions with ZF figures, both online and IRL, I have never gotten so much as a whiff of any particular political mission, unless you consider encouraging/facilitating the participation of a diverse community to be an edgy or problematic political take.
There is nothing to be gained by catering to a group that only feels comfortable when they are free to disparage, denigrate or exclude others based on their identity and their ability to live their identity openly. That applies wherever either party sits on the political spectrum. Up to this point, I’ve not encountered any of that exclusionary impulse from any angle within the Zcash community. I’ve seen a lot of evidence, to the contrary, that we are a community that encompasses (rather harmoniously!) a very wide political spectrum. What unites us is a dedication to privacy and individual freedoms, which does not belong to the left, the right, the center, or any other dimension.
I think it would take some very precise, very concrete, and very problematic examples of ZF prioritizing some sort of sidebar political agenda over its stated mission to convince me (and most within this community, I hope and believe) that this is a genuine problem for and within ZF.
I’d wager that people are attracted to line going up on a chart, vs their values aligning with the community’s. Maybe they stick around if the values match up, but price is the biggest attractor of new members.
Also: @Dodger if you truly want diversity of thought like you claim, you need to listen to all sides whether or not it’s something you disagree with (OP’s post, clearly). I don’t think suspending this person for 6 months really shows your tolerance to people you disagree with.
I’m getting flashbacks from 3 years ago.
It’s easy; talk is not just cheap. Talk should become less important in governance. Yeah? Cypherpunks write code or whatever, right?
Many of us really thought after the founders reward expired, the protocol would be left open in the wild for contributors investing their time and skills as they have them.
The only reason this discussion is being had is because of the funding the Foundation continues to receive.
Not that anyone cares, but I’ve grown to like the Community Dev Fund, while my knee jerk reaction was to oppose it as just scrap thrown to community just to legitimize continued ECC and Foundation funding. So odds are I’m missing the foundation’s value add here in the short term.
The conversation regarding expiration of funding is unfortunately getting to be within striking distance. ECC has essentially promised Proof of Stake and its propriety wallet.
I imagine a proof of stake transition will take longer than expiration of funding for ECC. It would be just splendid if it didn’t.
Whether you agree with the content of the opinion shared, consider that the funding mechanism is what lays the ground for all these frustrations.
I think if you’re going to complain about the Foundation, figure out how they should be wound down, not just throw up opinion.
Let’s not fall into this rather off topic popular debate
This is surprising to me.
Did you get the impression that our giving presenters the option of specifying their pronouns was intended as an insult to you and others who share your values?
Why do you use the word “enforcement”?
I agree with this 
%. The focus on privacy is what ensures that Zcash is censorship-resistant, and, therefore, available to all. The right to privacy is universal, no matter where on the political spectrum a person lies. Over the past six years, it’s been wonderful to work alongside people whose political views are very different from my own, but who share my belief in the importance of privacy. It’s the sort of value that can unite communists and capitalists in pursuit of a common cause.
I’d love to see an open and wide-ranging discussion about which values the Zcash community shares, and where different groups diverge.
As I wrote above, I am very interested in listening to constructive, intelligent, well-informed criticism.
The OP wasn’t suspended because they wrote something I disagree with. This forum is full of people expressing views and opinions that I don’t necessarily agree with! 
Also, the OP is suspended for six weeks, not six months.
What are the last 3 deliverables from Zcash Foundation?
What were the total combined costs to deliver those 3?
And did their delivery add tangible value to Zcash Ecosystem, ZEC, and-or end users?
If we want to create a material evaluation against ZF, I think that measurements of substance would be most appropriate. This personalization of us-vs-them on topic of team composition by their human traits is strange, and I believe inappropriate. Engineering talent can be measured quite objectively and so long as we grant ZF the good faith to be selecting people of best objectively measured engineering talent - then lets not indulge in the use of pronoun openness as a primary point of debate to defund ZF
If defunding feels like a rational debate to have; How about we look at material evidence first
I used enforcement because by all appearances every presenter had a preferred pronoun next to their name. I may be mistaken as I haven’t watched all of the presentations yet.
I would not say that you personally had any direct intention of insulting folks with traditional values but rather overlooked how it could be interpreted. Perhaps this was was an oversight based on the existing makeup of the Zcon planning board, perhaps you spearheaded this initiative and take all responsibility. Regardless, normalizing pronoun use is ideological whether you want it to be or not and it doesn’t matter if it was optional for the presenters to specify or not.
And just to keep this relevant to the topic and respond to other comments, I wouldn’t advocate for defunding ZF based on this one action but rather petition ZF to consider what the original poster was intending to relay rather than just writing it off as simply inflammatory: you did something political, even if it wasn’t intentionally so, and some of the community is against it. Will you listen to us, too?
Paul Bringer didn’t have any pronouns (State of Legislation, Regulation and Policy with Paul, Kurt, Peter & Jack at Zcon3 - YouTube). 
@Dodger has ZF considered directly hiring (and funding) QEDIT once their ZSA work is complete rather then QEDIT going through ZCG rounds again?
Well, let me clarify a few things.
Nobody who attended, presented or appeared on a panel at Zcon3 was required to or forced to specify their preferred pronouns.
On the Zcon3 registration form, there was an optional field which allowed attendees to specify their preferred pronouns if they so wished. The explanatory text for that field highlighted the fact that the field was optional, and that, if the attendee did complete it, the contents would be displayed on their name tag.
57% of attendees opted to complete this field.
Nor did 10 other speakers or panellists.
Well, let me first say that I think QEDIT is exactly the sort of team that the Major Grants slice of the Dev Fund was intended to fund: an independent team with “substantial (current or prospective) continual existence”, that is capable of performing “major ongoing development” for the public good of the Zcash ecosystem.
If, after completing the current ZSA-focused grant, QEDIT wanted to continue contributing to Zcash but had a grant application rejected by the ZCG Committee, we would certainly look at what ZF could do to retain them in the Zcash ecosystem.
It’s also entirely possible that ZF might want to partner with QEDIT on programmability-related work at some point in the future, when we’re ready to start working on that.
I ask about QEDIT because they appear to have done and thought more about the goal of making Zcash smarter then ZF has. If, as you stated, grants are the best source for funding QEDIT then in the medium term maybe ZF don’t need to be funded to support this objective in any substantial way.
So when assessing the funding level requirements currently everything ZF does I’d categorise as supporting and growing Zcash ecosystem.
Support the Zcash community & Foster the growth of the Zcash ecosystem
This is great and I’d love for the community to continue funding ZF for these efforts. But I think the concern that has been raised by the community a few times now is that maybe if these are the only strategic goals ZF require funding for maybe 5% of the dev fund is too much.
Meaningless metric and weak addendum to your argument. When 57% becomes 77% because the in-group preference of those who have opted for the inclusion of specifying their pronouns become the majority (like attracts like), you will run into a similar situation of what happens in every larger company in the silicon valley: India's Caste System in Silicon Valley : Rough Translation : NPR.
Introducing politically-charged pronouns into the company’s processes have already had a provably net negative impact to the Zcash project by wasting (the head of ZF’s) time individually replying to the criticism of it, instead of providing value to the community on a project that sorely needs a fresh perspective and a leader that doesn’t fragment it over political sideshows.
Cypherpunks write code.
https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-is-a-mission-focused-company-af882df8804
I don’t believe that engaging with community members who have (constructive) criticism or concerns is a waste of time. In fact, I’d say that engaging with and listening to feedback from the Zcash community is one of the most important aspects of my role.
Some people like to live in an echo chamber, only paying attention to opinions and feedback from people who agree with them, and ignoring those who disagree. That approach can lead to some very bad outcomes, and I have no interest in going down that path.
So, if you have constructive, intelligent, well-informed criticism, I am very interested in hearing it, and I’ll engage when I think it’s appropriate, such as to explain the rationale behind a decision, or to correct a misunderstanding (e.g. Paige’s belief that there was “pronoun enforcement”, which was absolutely not the case).
Or maybe it’s too little. 
ZF receives the smallest slice of the Dev Fund. More funding would enable us to increase our budget, meaning that we could do more, quicker. For example, we could hire more engineers, which would allow us to accelerate work on Zebra, deploy FROST quicker (and begin exploring some of the benefits it will unlock), and start work on other improvements sooner, such as programmability, exploring adding OMR- or detection key-based light wallet services to Zebra, improve network-level privacy by taking advantage of Arti, and other ideas that we have for improving Zcash that we don’t have the resources to prioritize anytime soon.
Fair point @Dodger. Personally I find it really hard to keep up with what ZF’s priorities and backlog looks like without a rough roadmap.
I had assumed with over $6m in USD and 170k of ZEC the ZF wasn’t under budget constraints. I understand ZF is currently spending the full ZEC of dev funds they receive but I think ZF might be a little too risk adverse and should increase their budget to $4m per year and eat into those massive USD (and ZEC) reserves but I get it and am aware I’m unlikely to change a strategic business decision 
.
On the topic of what ZF should fund if they had more means I’d argue FROST as 1. It’d give Zcash enough functionality to claim “DAO like structures” which I think is incredibly important right now. Take my situation… Ive recently been given the opportunity to add crypto addresses to the user paid snack/drinks fridge at work (software lab with ~100 staff). Without shielded threshold addresses (i.e. FROST) for the kitty I’m going to have a harder time convincing people to use Zcash over another crypto that has threshold addresses .
Honestly, I think a discussion about the shortcomings about the ZF is warranted and it seems like @Dodger welcomes it. My main issue is this thread has been derailed to talk about things that don’t provide direct targeted feedback to the ZF for the work that it has done and how to improve upon it. The issue of pronouns, etc is just proof of how America centric the ZF is but it doesn’t really have much bearing on their work. Maybe the ZF just needs more worldwide representation instead of focusing on such issues. We should be focused mainly on that regardless of ideological differences. Personally, I think the ZF does a great job considering its budget constraints and the R&D they have been able to push out. FROST has had industry wide interest and clearly, the ZF has done a good job of shepherding that work. There are other areas in which the ZF is lacking that should be thoroughly discussed before attempting to limit how much money they receive.
Contrary to popular belief, we shouldn’t be minimizing the amount of money an entity gets if they aren’t doing as good of a job we think they should be doing. Instead, we should discuss their shortcomings and see how they can improve within the current constraints that they have. If things don’t change, then perhaps defunding the ZF might be warranted. But from what I’ve seen, I don’t think the ZF should be defunded.