Focus of grants

Holding ZCG Accountable for their Investment Decisions.

If the dev fund is investing in tools or solutions that are not being used by end users or developers, the invest has not been effective. The Dev Fund is only as effective as zcash community members hold ZCG five representatives accountable for their investment decisions.
If we in the community have no method to measure how effective a project is used or not used, we really have no method of evaluating if the investment was worth it.

Suggested Solutions:

-.01) Every Dev Fund recipient is obligated to conduct workshops for their funded solutions, write informative documentation that devs can follow and use for the created solutions. (Get out and hussle your solution)
-.02) Stop only investing Dev Funds in lightwalletd
-.03) Each ZCG representative needs to each month explain to the community how effective the funded projects are in increasing zcash/privacy user grow.

“Code Alone Doesn’t Cut It”

ZCG is only allowed to review and approve grants that exist.
Again this is not a grants prioritization problem

Im comfortable in providing some numbers that are publicly available to help this conversation along. This dashboard of metrics from the grants committee websitewill help in seeing where grants are in the process and the funding across many projects.

The zf does an amazing job of tracking, monitoring, and keeping everyone informed of the progress and status of active and open grants. In this forum minutes of the meetings are posted for community review and feedback.The ZF is responsible for administration of approved grants and they hold the relationship with the grantees. ZCG is not an independent 3rd party, it is a community elected administrative review board and it is defined in the scope of ZIP-1014 as it is written today.

I can speak only for myself and hopefully this will help inform those looking to join ZCG in the future. Each grant and week is different so ymmv.

Be prepared to actively contribute at a minimum 15 hrs a month to be an effective member.

Of those:

7 hrs per month is administrative tasks and meetings.

  • 1.25 per week (5 hrs per month) on internal comms, ambassador comms, reading community feedback, rfps
  • 2 one hour zf /zcg official meetings per month for grants approval and comments

8 hrs is spent on application review
~2 hrs each depending on:

  • size of grant,
  • how easy information is to find,
  • if their github is easy to review,
  • meeting with the team
    This work cannot be farmed out and is why the zcg is elected.

This equates to roughly 4 grants per month or 48 grants per year.

Top down math: From the spreadsheet 122 total grants have been reviewed in ~2.5 years. This is ~48 per year.

The 40% of the dev fund desiginated for “Major Grants” is for large-scale long-term projects. This money is administered by the Zcash Foundation. There is no need to hire staff.

As of Aug 27, 2022, Zcash Community Grants has: 137,749.99 ZEC which equates to$8.5M USD at $61.61 ZECUSD

48 grants a year with an annual budget of 10 mil is still only ~200k on average per project in a bear market.

The pipeline is open for grants to be submitted. In the last zf / zcg meeting I asked for some metrics around how long each step of the process takes so we can provide transparency to recipients.

The help needed from the community is in finding teams with big ideas and little money and getting them on the path to funding.

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My reading of the situation is that the strategy is to somehow keep the zcash media buzz alive (let’s give 2% of the fund to zcash media, let’s allocate a fix budget for media for ZCG, zcash media’s “bridge grant”, regulatory folk need expensive documentaries to make their lives easy, etc) until ZCG members who were against funding the 1.8 million proposal finish their tenure.

I’d be surprised if it is not exactly around that time that the new proposal(s) will be presented.

Funding this proposal seems to be a priority item for some of the powers that be in Zcash and sadly, I very much doubt that it will not get pushed through eventually.

It was recently even implied that “Zcash Media is one of the most important things for the future of humanity”, for Christ’s sake.

As you can see, this whole “let’s fund Zcash Media with 2 million dollars” thing is really reaching biblical levels of absurdity.

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I have been involved in the acquisition of top technical talent globally for over a decade, have helped built some truly extraordinary technical teams for leading hi-tech companies, and not once did I need expensive media productions to lure this top talent, no matter how obscure the technology was. Not once.

If you are having problems in managing to recruit top technical profiles, I assure you that the lack of pricey media productions is not the thing that’s getting in your way.

If anything, very expensive documentaries is the least optimal tool that I can think of.

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This made me chuckle. Thank you for that. For me it really makes no sense to fund educational content when infrastructure doesn’t work. It’s the equivalent of flashing money down the drain.

We fund media, people learn about Zcash, they test it out and realise wallet functionality is beyond subpar. They are thrown off from wanting to use it, no one will also want to contribute to a project that is marketing its product, a product that right now “sucks”.

It makes no sense. And it really is a case of media OR developers. And the answer is without a doubt developers.

Expensive YouTube videos is not a necessity for recruiting top talent. Never was. Isn’t. Never will be.

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Ongoing Youtube campaign would be a profligate waste of other peoples money IMHO.

Concentrate on fixing UX, its badly broken and there is nothing to show the world anyway.

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