@gmale, I’m very sorry that you and @str4d were offended by what I wrote, because my intent was exactly opposite: to support @str4d’s et al.'s efforts in the face of ECC management that is doggedly pushing against this excellent work (at least as communicated in its formal priorities, requirements, flight plans and various public conversations).
When I see @str4d et al. doing amazing work on UDA, that’s so effective and high-quality that it’s already deployed by Tezos, but then ECC management squelches it by secretly deciding that even “precursor support” for this work is explicitly out of scope for the forthcoming network upgrade, meaning Zcash users won’t get UDAs for at least a year… well yes, color my forum post title inflamed.
BTW, I felt very similarly when ECC management failed to support the early mobile wallet work. Very glad that we’re way past that.
Now, I expect that you jumped at the “secretly deciding” wording above. It was public, wasn’t it?! And this brings me to the other recurring point. Let me diverge from the original topic (is there a different forum topic to move this to?), and dwell on that.
ECC’s effective (non-)transparency
ECC lives in a Where’s Waldo world, where much is in view, but little is visible. ECC uses and generates an enormous amount of public documents, spread over many pages over many accounts over many of services and websites. This is fine and admirable. But practically, it means that mere mortals, whose full-time job isn’t tracking these documents, can’t keep track of what’s important. The community can’t effectively discover important new discussions and decisions, without timely and specific cues. So for effective transparency, ECC has to accept the onus of providing such cues and help.
The good news is that this problem is relatively easy to solve. The hard work of creating the materials, and of sticking your neck out on making them public, is already done! In my opinion, all ECC needs to do is spend a bit more time in helping the community figure out where to look, and creating true public conversations about the most important things. My suggestions:
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ECC, please create a clear webpage pointing to all the public resources you use for planning, tracking and development. Explain how they fit together and what’s in each. Keep it up to date.
Lithmus test: where do I go to find out what are the most important technical and strategic decisions currently underway, that I can provide input for?
ECC folks, this stuff may be obvious to you, but it’s literally your job to keep track of it. Even I, who have closely collaborated with ECC, have been unable to track the evolution of your planning and tracking resources; and last time I asked, I was told that some crucial “overlay” parts that express priorities and links aren’t even public yet and you’re working on that. -
ECC, please be clear and explicit about major planning processes and decisions.
For example, having explicitly-defined requirements for Orchard is excellent. Furthermore, it’s good that @elenita mentioned it in her January 29, 2021 - weekly forum update post…
But it was buried in that forum post under the irrelevant "Security’ heading, in a cryptically-labelled “Added requirements to ZIP 224 PRD”, linking to a confusingly-rendered Pull Request, where you have to click on “Files Changed” and read all the way to line 168 to see any mention of UDA.
So yes, the plans were on display.
IMHO, when ECC made this major decision to not ensure that a major network upgrade is compatible with a widely-requested feature, the right thing to do was to state so clearly and prominently in, say, a dedicated forum post.
No, strike that. When ECC was going to decide that question, it should have posted prominently and asked for opinions. And this leads me to: -
ECC, here’s a handy keyboard shotcut:
Shift+/produces the symbol?, which is a punctuation mark commonly used to convey so-called “questions”. “Asking questions” is a form of communication where you seek information from the counterparty to a conversation. By using the keyboard shortcut, you can convey that you wish to receive such information, that you welcome and respect your counterparty’s view, and that your intend to take into consideration the information and needs that your countrparty expresses.
A downside of “questions” is that receiving and responding to your counterparty’s answers may entail further effort. This can get especially burdensome if your counterparty is also interested in understanding your own view, and may thus ask some questions in return.
However, this burden should be balanced against the alternative, which is doing whatever you feel like without asking the people affected. This creates the risk of doing the wrong thing, and even worse: dealing with “inflammatory” forum post topics when people find out.
Frustratingly, none of this is new. On numerous analogous occasions, I’ve said similar things to every single person at ECC who has the power to address this communication issue. Some progress has been made, such as @elenita’s excellent updates, but not nearly enough.