Hey @rekodi. Thank you for these thoughts. There is much in here that I agree with including the desire to see actionable clarity from both the ECC and the Zcash Foundation. Like you, I suspect that if we were clear about our vision and roadmaps for ZEC the token, and Zcash the protocol, it would help others like Zcash Media and QEDIT step forward with their own ideas and initiatives related to opportunities that ECC and the foundation are unable to focus on because of our own limited time and resources. I also really like the new initiative the grants committee started to issue RFPs where it sees unmet needs.
As for a joint roadmap, that gets a little tricky. We likely don’t have the same perspective on some priorities or even the implications, and the community needs its voice heard on these priorities and as well as related potentially contentious issues.
For example, I think both ECC and the Zcash Foundation are interested in a well considered path to pool deprecation. But that opens up all sorts of questions about how to handle ZEC stored in those old pools. Personally, I don’t think that’s something that either org should try to decide in a vacuum. The question of changing consensus to PoS is another - which also opens up all sorts of questions I won’t try to enumerate here.
We at ECC are working on a protocol roadmap, largely focused on interop and PoS research and will be releasing a series of blogs with probably more questions than answers at the outset. These are intended to open the conversation with the community, including the Zcash Foundation. We’ve had great conversations with the foundation about our desire for dialogue with the community about our thoughts and research at Zcon3. I believe we’re well aligned there. It’s going to be an amazingly rich and important conference! I hope you’ll be there.
We also owe the community other ECC roadmaps that may or may not align with the Zcash Foundation’s plans. Our stated “North Star” is to deliver a world class UX for ZEC. That includes a set of activities in support of the user experience focused on ZEC token adoption, for example, UI tooling such as a wallet, commercial adoption and so on. We are working to bring clarity on those activities - some of those things being highly exploratory, iterative and opportunistic. We hope to talk about some of those things at Zcon3 as well - we’ve submitted some topics to the foundation for consideration. We also have a new team in place, including a new head of product marketing that just started with us yesterday! I’m excited for everyone to meet her.
Based on what I’ve seen from the talented team at the Zcash Foundation, I suspect they are doing similar things. The foundation’s communications about their own North Star and roadmap would also help the community in a manner I believe you are suggesting and I suspect would help answer the question Zooko posed in the thread.
[edit: I just saw this new post from @Dodger!]
I, for one, don’t feel like we’re on life support but do believe we can do much better, and even now that we’ve turned a couple significant corners with the protocol. Let’s hold ourselves accountable for that, and as always, we are open to feedback on thoughts on ECC’s plans for and execution in delivering a world class UX for ZEC.