I hear what you’re saying, but I just think building a community-run governance system will just be a much more direct route to more lively and effective governance. I think it is in the spirit of decentralization and community empowerment. I actually think it will help make discussions and consensus-building more efficient to have a clear process for decision-making, supported by elected community members whose mandate is to support and organize the process (e.g., by deliberating rules for ZPP membership, ushering in new ZPP voters, analyzing and consolidating proposals to help with voter understanding and outreach).
As mentioned, the ZF did good work by starting ZCAP in the first place and putting rules in place for expanding it. That helped Zcash go from 0 to 1 in terms of the community having input into overarching matters. Then ZCG came along, which improved things further to put major capital allocation ability into the hands of a community-run board. (Notably, ZCG received the highest marks in @aquietinvestor’s poll: Dev Fund 2024: Community Poll & Discussion Megathread. I suspect the fact that it is a transparent, democratically-elected and -accountable system that empowers the community has something to do with it.) Expanding governance further to have more community involvement seems like a continuation of these improvements.
Also, I think it is safe to say that the ZF does not want to oversee an evolution of ZCAP into a voting body that deals with issues beyond the scope of ZF’s mandate. The ZF board unanimously agreed on this recently:
Also, in the Twitter spaces (and maybe elsewhere), @Dodger has repeatedly said that the ZF does not have a monopoly on governance or Helios and he would encourage others to experiment with governance designs [1]. Further, there has been a lot of desire for improving/experimenting with governance designs: i) ZIP-1014 “Future Community Governance” (mentioned above). ii) “Determining Community Consensus: Discussion Group”. iii) @gottabeJay’s comment, etc.
Yet, after all that, there is no visible movement from anyone but @GGuy and others thinking along the same lines (e.g., @joshs’s post initially floating the idea of a “Zenate”) to actually propose something. Why wait for someone else to do something when the people who are motivated to do something are already here?
If coin-weighted voting is created, as you proposed to develop, there could be a million people voting and only a dozen people contributing code (hopefully more in the future). I don’t think people want to micromanage, I think they just want to be able to use common sense to have a tangible say in the direction of the project. For instance, without the ZCG, elected by 100+ community members, there may not have been a route to support Ywallet as thoroughly. In many cases, you don’t have to code to know what’s working or not working.
Footnotes:
[1] Of course, just because people may experiment with new governance designs doesn’t mean they are “binding” (we can’t just make up arbitrary rules for other people to follow - the ZF is already weary of this) - I think something like ZSC/ZPP will only gain “binding” ability if it is well run and is seen as a legitimate representation of the Zcash community. Nonetheless, there is already a pathway for things like the ZSC/ZPP to have binding ability for things like the Dev Fund due to section “19.12” of the trademark agreement.