I’d like to announce my candidacy for ZOMG.
My goal, if elected, is to
Good to see one more candidate with technical background standing. Since you are planning to run for a decision making - community position, it would be good to clarify the following points & any misunderstandings:
Early this year when you joined the forums and shared your technical knowledge on various posts, I reached out to you in April for collaboration before creating the Nighthawk grant & contribute to upstream codebase, which is useable by everyone, but you did not respond. Then, you went your way to build out a PoC wallet for your improved mobile syncing algorithms with Zwallet and Ywallet for Ycash.
Zcash has benefitted from kind and helping members from the community, ECC & ZF who have encouraged members wanting to build on Zcash & stick around.
Following your rhetorical questions on my team’s Thorchain grant application, I wanted to connect with you to resolve your comments. But you have refused communication via DM.
As for vetting grants, it is easy to criticize, but difficult to appreciate the efforts of a grant applicant.
In the past, you have made your comments with your assumptions and without asking questions (although that seems to have improved recently).
Being technically skilled is one thing, but if ZOMG members cannot work with peers or applicants, then there is a risk of endless churn when attracting builders on Zcash, even after ZOMG members dedicate to a 20hr a month workload.
Both. Developers are interested in different things.
I think zcash can benefit from both kinds of devs and they don’t have to be the same person/team.
As an independent dev, I plan to contribute as much as I can to any project I can. I think other members of ZOMG can if they want. In fact, I don’t see how what they do in their free time is any of my business as long as it does not interfere with their duties.
But I did offer to communicate openly. This goes along with my pledge for more transparency from ZOMG and the grantees.
I have managed teams from 1 (me) to hundreds. Obviously, the approach varies. Since time is limited and 1h / week isn’t much, I intend to communicate mostly through management tools.
For instance, I think project managers could use a project tracking system such as Trello, Jira, Redmine, or Phabricator. We could open read access to the community and it would serve as a reporting tool as well.
This grant came with a track record. As such, my evaluation was not out of context. Besides, I researched similar implementations to better gauge the project.
IMO, the ZOMG does not have the time/resources to do a lot more than vetting. It is the responsibility of the grantees to present their best case. For instance, in the proposal you mention, I think they have to justify why it takes 4 senior devs 6 months to do an email project.
It could have been a major project, i.e. Gmail is way more than 4 devs / 6 months, but also much less. This is related to my pledge of “request more detailed planning and deliverables”.
Sure, but it cuts both ways. For example, originally the Moeda.casa proposal seemed too vague and fuzzy to me. I expressed my concerns. They came back with a more concrete proposal. I think devs appreciate constructive feedback (I do). I support their new proposal.
From my side, the code is written and tested. I didn’t request payment of the remaining 60% of the grant yet - though I feel I would be justified in doing so.
Currently, I’m standing by for NU-5 because I’d like to add Orchard support and UA ( even though the grant was only about sapling ).
Finally, I hope we can savage by integrating with another payment gateway: BTCPay. I think that even if CoinPayments never comes back, we will have a zcash shielded payment option so I wouldn’t call it a failure.
You raise a good point about attracting peers or applicants. I think the ZOMG can help but it is not its primary mandate. It can sponsor videos, documentaries, etc. and it helps. But I think ultimately, we need more involvement from ECC/ZF.
For example, another project I follow, Mina Protocol, has frequent podcasts, explainer videos, live chats, and blogs from their leaders. I think it helps a lot when the author is the CEO, CTO, COO, … vs a less known person. The message could be the same but it has more clout.
My second suggestion is to invest in the documentation. We are in a transition period (NU-5) and the team is under a lot of pressure, so I understand this is not the priority now. For example, an article like
about Halo2 would be great.
Finally, we want to attract high quality projects not just any project. I think we need to be professional but also firm.
Hi,
I have really liked watching your projects develop on this board. You are doing some great work. 
We do need more developers on the zomg with zcash experience imho. (not 5 but 2 maybe 3)
Your pitch is pretty short, I have a few questions.
Given the current comments about how the ZOMG has functioned from @cburniske and @Dodger, how would you address these? What would your ideal resolution look like? How well do you think you will be able to work in Dodgers stated post?
This is not quite true. Yes your private life and free time is yours, however there is a large burden of ethics that comes with taking a position on a grants council. You would need to do more than “not interfere with duties” you would need to adhere to the code of conduct and ethics statements, so no doing stuff that harms zcash.
Continuing to build for another coin i guess is okay. however it could raise conflict of interest issues. two that immediately come to mind are 1 - taking ideas you see and implementing them on other chains or 2 - denying or approving grants that will help other coins rather than on their merit for zcash.
I dont think it should stop you being on the zomg but there are things you will need to make sure you dont do, because a credible accusation is all it would take to make attracting developers near impossible.
can you reassure me that this will not happen?
Thanks and goold luck!
Clearly this is a complex issue and I can see both sides arguments. In my opinion, we don’t need a 3rd independent organization. In fact, I find 2 entities already confusing for a late comer. As a separate entity the ZOMG will have a lot of overlap with the other 2.
If we restrict the role of the ZOMG to purely reviewing grants, I believe the workload is acceptable
but only if we expect something like “Shark Tank”.
However, currently, the ZOMG implicitly had to take charge of:
All of these fall out of their mandate and should either be the someone else’s job or
the resources and profile of the ZOMG should be readjusted accordingly.
My preference would be to have help from ECC/ZF for marketing and promotional material. I have mentioned another project where their leadership engages frequently with the community.
The ECC/ZF has also cutting-edge research & crypto/security experts.
But if they are understaffed as well, I’m open to grow the ZOMG to fill the gap. I feel that at this point, project management is the most urgent weak link to address.
I think this would clearly fall under interfering with ZOMG duties. I can assure you this is not going to happen.
My only issue is that @hanh doesn’t seem collaborative with non core devs.
@Ziga has great design skills, you could’ve leveraged & build first class mobile application.
I also saw a comment from @aiyadt regarding the same. I interacted with them, they are good people to work with.
Sorry, I just don’t have enough time to work with everyone.
ZWallet code is open source and everyone is welcome to participate. We have tech and non tech contributions, and would love to see UI/UX additions.
A month ago, I setup a Figma project to gather UI/UX feedback.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get any. Maybe @Ziga would be interested in sharing his suggestions there?
How would you have time to evaluate Zcash projects?
@aiyadt asked me to join his team. @Ziga wanted to join mine.
These are higher levels of time commitments than 1h/week.
One is understandable. Joining a team may not be for everyone. For second, haven’t you managed 100s of people. What’s important for Zwallet (awesome eng work you have done) is UX treatment for mass adoption if that’s your plan.
Anyway, that said, I support you considering everything I have seen on forums. Feedback: be more approachable, available
Yes but not directly. I had reports with reports with reports …
From past experience, working with designers takes a considerable amount of time and the app was not ready for it. It was missing important functionalities that came later.
UI/UX is really important and I know this is not my strong suit. Any help and contributions are welcome.
Thanks for your support and feedback.
Some questions worth knowing about:
But until ZWallet core tech (Warp Sync) was designed and implemented, I could not be sure. I think ZWallet will remain part R&D and part regular wallet with some unique extra features (Cold Wallet, P&L, Contact List, etc)
I can help the ZOMG and by extension, the community, evaluate the technical merits of projects. This is only one of the criteria of a successful grant but nonetheless an important one.
Zcash is where most of the cutting-edge crypto comes from. To grow in an area of knowledge, it helps to be around the best in the field.
So succinct & clear
Hey I have these questions for all ZOMG candidate:
How important is ZEC price appreciation for you ?
To the Zcash investors that buy and hold ZEC and who make the devfund possible, what can you tell them that you will do to make their investment turning into fruition ?
I don’t mean to hijack this thread, but since I was tagged, I figured I’d respond quickly.
Submitting one off contributions for UI/UX doesn’t work very well from my experience. It’s fine for tweaking smaller usability issues, but the app needs far more consideration when it comes to design.
It is difficult to offer simple suggestions when I feel the right approach would be to go through a proper design process, which would require a few months of work.
That’s correct. I would be interested in helping out, but there would need to be a proper design process put into place. Hit me up if you’re interested.
Great. We’ll contact you when the app is more stable then.
Sorry I didn’t notice your post earlier.
I think we all want the price of ZEC to increase. For the project, it will mean having more resources to attract talent too.
Zcash investors value Zcash for its strong privacy. The grants that the ZOMG will offer are going to be instrumental in making privacy accessible for everyone. Zcash is the gold standard for privacy; it needs to be the gold standard for the speed, accessibility and utility.