As a participant in the grant advisory committee for the very first and second rounds of Zcash Foundation Grants I can say the criteria were basically:
- How well does this project fit into the Zcash Foundations mission?
- Who is the team behind it and what is the likelyhood of success?
- Is the cost reasonable for performing such work?
The first two rounds were very academic style (ie: cumbersome) with plenty of time spent with the reviewers going over a spreadsheet with all the proposals. Different reviewers would do a deep-dive into a proposal and rate it with a 1-5 of support. After that we had a Hangouts meeting to discuss our findings and for debate on the merits of each proposal.
After that it was a matter of budget, what projects would give the most “bang for the buck” and use the allotment most effectively. We then presented our findings to the Zcash Foundation board for final review and approval/rejection of the projects.
We learned that the academic style review/debate/review/present/approval process was very slow and out of that was born the current Zcash Foundation Grant platform: grants.zfnd.org which is a much less paperwork intensive process.
CC @acityinohio