I made one. And I had people say they won’t join because they don’t like the domain, and that it should be run by ZF instead 
. Getting people to leave Xitter join a new platform (they can stay on Xitter too if they like it) has proven very challenging.
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It seems pretty clear, you want to control the ZF block rewards, and you dont like what ZF does with the money. Likewise, I Ithink ZGC has wasted a lot of money. So the problem is the governance of these entities, not that we need more orgs with poor governance. More orgs=more waste. We need better governance quickly. Consensus is probably the worst decision making process I can think of, including polls. I beleive I understand why you like them. Its easier to control the outcome. But wee need real democracy where our community is defined by ZEC holders. That is what we are building a community of ZEC holders.
Currently we are at the mercy of the markets because without fees, we have no control over our destiny. We need the market to place a high value on ZEC and it clearly does not. So giving away transactions for free when they cost around $10/each is a bad strategy over the long run (its been a long time now). The orgs have not delivered on a viable way forward. If we had products people wanted and they paid a fee, we could get back some control from the fees. Fees are the best way to democratize. We could have an unlimited number of community orgs that answer only to themselves and dont need to beg from the dev fund because they create their own customer driven funding (from the fees). The problem is you want to create “cost centers”. Cost centers spend money. They dont generate revenue. We need to democratize around “profit centers”. Profit centers generate revenue and pay for themselves and more… Each “profit center” becomes its own org. More cost centers will sink us. Profit centers fund growth; more development; more products; more value. We need to focus on profit, not creating more costs.
But for now, Implement coin holder voting for board members and possibly core projects, where the board and CEO decide the project vision (we pay them a lot and that should be their job, and we can vote annually keep them or not), reduce the orgs to one org, and focus on ZEC. Then hope we can plug the holes in the boat so that it doesn’t sink.
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outreach and education involves more than code
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Telling people ZEC is a fiat alternative is like educating them that people should be using beads instead of dollars. Its not going to happen. People want stability. ZEC is digital gold. Not fiat. Its all wasted when you tell them its fiat. To make something better than the USD, we need to use better collateral than the fed and make it less volatile than the USD. Uncollateralized ZEC will never be useful as a fiat alternative because without collateral it will always be volatile. Our best hope is that it becomes the collateral and a staking token for a privacy network.
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Outreach and education is such a weird hill to die on. You think Google had to educate everyone how to use a search engine? It was simple and it just worked 
A direct result of the code.
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The ideal solution is to give ZEC stakeholders a voice. Cryptocurrencies are about people. They solve problems for people. You need to find the people & business it solves problems for and hand it to them. A lot of popular currencies aren’t as advanced or capable as Zcash yet they are used more because they have vibrant communities.
Give stakeholders a voice. Get them involved.
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It should not be a voice, it should be the majority voice. Anyone who is not a ZEC holder should be a very small minority. Building a project where the primary token (ZEC) is considered to be an outcast makes little sense and likely at least one reason why no one wants to own it. It like living in the USA and letting people in North Korea vote on our policies. I dont think they are going to vote for things that are good for the USA. We know who are citizens are, and they are ZEC holders. They should control its policies, and development. There are material risks to consensus as well a) anyone can vote, including people who vote for things that hurt ZEC, IE People who want to see it fail - competitors as an example. b) people who want money from ZEC to fund their grants who also care less about the ZEC price or whether or not its good for ZEC protocol c) people who want to fund an ideology at all costs even if it takes ZEC in a direction that might not be good for the project. So even though consensus may sound good. It also has many drawbacks.
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@Jgx7, I think we share common ground, but our focus seems to be on the differences. Don’t we agree that user representation is essential?
Consider the spam attack on Zcash. A key issue was the lack of direct communication between ECC, ZF, and users. Typically, businesses involve stakeholders in decision-making, especially during crises. The absence of user representatives in discussions with ECC during the attack was a missed opportunity. Stakeholder calls could have provided valuable insights and questions from a user perspective.
The ZSC, with its elected members, is designed to represent users. In situations like the spam attack, having a user representative could prompt important questions and suggestions. For example, they might have asked about the feasibility and timeline of different solutions, like warpsync. While I’m not advocating for a specific solution, it’s clear that better user representation could have mitigated the impact on them.
we agree we need representation → for zec holders. it’s very confusing as to how anyone believes the community extends beyond zec holders. they are the ones paying for development, they hold and they buy. with that, we have too many orgs. let’s fix the governance. eliminate orgs. and create decentralized development. Ethereum is killing it. We are not even in the game by focusing on privacy without store of value; without governance; and without decentralized customer fee based development.
I appreciate Polkadot’s vision, but as someone who as actually used DOT’s governance, I can honestly say its extremely complicated. The amount of DOT you need staked changes, you have to manage who your delegated to, its not simple. Cosmos does it better, full stop.
Have you used ICP’s : NNS Dapp
Another fun interface to play with.
No problem, just wanted to add my experiences. I hope more folks try for themselves 
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.
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