Dev Fund Proposal: 5-Entity Strategic Council Approach

20% after this up coming halving would be equal to 10% today. Do you think it should be 5% in today’s ZEC volume?

2 Likes

You forgot to mention that the founder’s reward will disappear (well part of it). This will largely increase the share that goes to the ECC. Largely. The ECC now gets a little 2.8% without the founders & vested empoyees part it will increase. (the foundation will increase the share too)

1 Like

I don’t think this is implied with this proposal. It maxes the allocation at 33% for any one party and opens applications beyond ECC and Zfnd.

2 Likes

I am not questioning new elegant and innovative ways of building an efficient governance. I am just making a point on the general costs. Far too high.
This is what I love to see (maybe with z addresses for donations working):

Alongside a little but strong teams of core devs paid by the miners via a block reward.

1 Like

Yeah I think it is an interesting and worthwhile discussion to think about how much we should spend. At the same time, I could make an argument that people should want to spend as much on development as can be justified with a high ROI. For example, if every $1 spent the price of ZEC went up $10, it may be better to allocate 40% and everyone would be better off.

I don’t have a strong opinion on what the % should be, but it’s not immediately obvious to me that it should be higher or lower.

2 Likes

What is the cost of driving adoption of a scalable privacy-preserving currency at a global scale while employing the top-shelf cryptographers and engineers to build for scale and extensibility? I’m not trying to be snarky (no pun intended), but I have some perspective. I would honestly love counter perspectives. Most times, we all have to live and get creative within reasonable constraints.

3 Likes

Yeah… But knowing the ROI of an investment in advance is pure magic. If you know it, please let me know. Every semester I just hope my dev team has been addressed towards the right projects…

1 Like

Now that ZEC’s price is at the bottom, you may not have considered the potential future price growth of ZEC.

@daira and I made an initial review pass over this PreZIP. This is not a formal part of the proposal process (in particular, @daira is not acting in hir role as ZIP editor); this is just a joint comment between @daira and myself on the current state of the PreZIP.


“Perfect execution” is expecting a lot! This is probably too strong for just defining as terminology. Also delete the extra “held”.

This should be defined in the terminology (or in-place if it only occurs here, but it shouldn’t only occur here, because the Abstract should only summarize the ZIP, and the ZIP should be self-contained without its Abstract).

This section is fine for the thread, but it is irrelevant for the ZIP, and should be removed. Similarly the first sentence of “My Motivation”.

Doesn’t really belong in the ZIP, as it is too close to being pure opinion.

This changes to “Who decides the strategy” in subsequent references, and should be made consistent.

Flip-flops between this, “exceptional execution”, and “excellent execution”. Replace with consistent and realistic terminology.

This is ambiguous; “sprint” is terminology used in Agile development for short (e.g. 2-week) work chunking that doesn’t include breathers (which would be constant overhead). A different word would be preferable.

Requires a rationale for choosing this particular scope (i.e. jurisdiction as the only possible criterion). Add this to the list of issues / further discussion.

Clarify that this is defining the process for voting on seats in elections, not having seats vote on issues in general course.

Given that this implies self-nominations, the ZIP needs to specify what happens if e.g. the result of voting would be that the elected nominees exceed the jurisdictional rules.

“Zcon”

This was 1-10 in the Abstract; update the Abstract to be consistent.

This kind of evaluation strategy might be suitable for proposals such as content marketing and SEO, but it significantly underestimates the difficulty of protocol design and implementation. Even a very competent team can underestimate the necessary work, and doing half of what was originally planned is often a very good result but could easily be interpreted as a failure on this scale. There should be some discussion of how the Strategic Council would deal with such a situation.

5 Likes

Very much appreciate your and @daira’s time in providing this feedback. I made a number of the quick updates. There are a few more substantive points that are probably a longer discussion.

If this were to become a ZIP, I’d trim out the irrelevant parts.

Thank you again for the feedback and help!

3 Likes

You’re not planning to champion the proposal further? Asking because if so I should take it off of the lists.

Oh for some reason I didn’t realize all proposals needed to be in official ZIP format for discussion by the community advisory panel. I’ll modify and make the remaining changes to make it a formal ZIP.

Should I also submit it as a PR or is leaving it on the forum in ZIP format sufficient?

2 Likes

I’m unclear on this. Seeking guidance and will get back to you.

Ideally, all proposal owners who intend to take their proposals forward should submit them as PRs. If you need help submitting a PR, or with other GitHub or rst formatting issues, please ask.

If there are proposals that owners wish to take forward but haven’t been submitted as PRs in the next week or so, I can submit them myself. But if owners do it then that will greatly reduce my workload, and give me more time for further substantive review.

2 Likes

I wrote an article about how I generally support moving forward with this “strategic council approach:”

2 Likes

Thanks for adding to this discussion @sgp and for submitting this proposal @avichal. I know @garethtdavies said this earlier, but I don’t really see how this proposal’s Strategic Council is structurally distinct from what the Foundation’s board is supposed to represent, except with new requirements for voting and the added wrinkle that these members would be compensated (unlike the Foundation’s board which is an uncompensated position).

As a straw man, why not modify the proposal to add new requirements to the Foundation’s board and make that the central entity in charge of distributing funds? (To be clear I don’t mean to imply I agree with that course of action) I know @avichal said the council shouldn’t also be involved in execution but I’m not sure I fully understand that risk. I’m also quite worried about structuring an election for this council when as @tromer mentioned there’s not much specificity in how that approach would work…which is why the Foundation structured our panel last year as an advisory body.

2 Likes

There needs to be more accountability in deliverables. If an organization fails to produce results, they should be able to lose their funding which is not how the ZF or ECC currently work (or would work in a 2-of-2 world). There are no teeth or consequences currently for ECC or ZF under-performing.

Relatedly, we need incentive structure for others to enter the ecosystem to try and compete with ECC or ZF.

A separation between people who have access to the funds and people doing the work is very important. This is also why I think the advisory approach ZF has doesn’t work.

Voting is certainly a challenge in this proposal and a big open question to work out

5 Likes

‘Everyone should work for someone else’, a guaranteed funding stream is like self-employment, not ideal.

1 Like

I echo @avichal’s points. The ZF would struggle to effectively oversee its own funding.

1 Like

I personally fully agree with this argumentation. I expect a lot of open and hidden resistance as i guess that neither the ZF nor the ECC wants to loss power and influence and of course funds allocated to them.

Me personally would even add a point, but that could be only my impression why a big part of the community likes the addition of a 3rd entity or an additional council. I think it’s because the community doesn’t feel enough represented and involved by the ECC and ZF.

One of the main differences would be that every year, or even in shorter intervals, the council/board would be elected/choosen. If i remember right the foundations board is for a full 4 year period and despite some voices in the past for shorter election intervals the foundation wasn’t really responsive on this one.

Further, right now it’s a bit like in a parliament, where representatives choose their own wage/income. I fully agree with avichal that there should be seperation on who does the work and who distributes the funds. The whole founders reward distribution so far shows that it was badly choosen for development, accountability and even transparency. A council or 3rd entity would hopefully change this, finally.

Why so much power for a single entity? If the community wanted that all power is at a single entity we could leave it all at the ECC. It’s interesting to see that there seems a power “rope pulling” going on, at least i have that impression by now after the trademark disaster.

The panel was a good attempt and i liked it, until the foundation made it invite only. Another concern with the advisory panel is the presence again of the same ECC and ZF members/employees/founders that make allready decisions within the ECC and ZF. But that’s just my opinion of course.