Greetings, Zcashers!
I share with you my thoughts on how we can improve future Community Grants voting processes, as well as the ZCAP structure.
I invite you to share your constructive impressions to reach consensus and continue building better governance and decentralization within Zcash.
I am among the new ones, but I dare to say that ZCAP members should be active in voting. Otherwise, the voting majority should be calculated based on active members in previous votes.
I respectfully disagree, here are my takes on your essay, take my word as a rejected applicant, as a future ZCAP member, and someone really invested in the success of Zcash.
I’ll not answer your points in any particular order, I’ll probably go back and forth between arguments, shall we begin?
Educational content are all fine and dandy, but can get saturated. What good would it make for someone to have all the books in the existence if they would never be able to read them all?
Let’s take a fictional country called ZecLand, in this country their population speaks Zeclandish. Let’s assume 5 teams are creating education content in Zeclandish. Since Zcash is still more or less a niche, the more content creators they have, isn’t necessarily better. Since the audience of these content creators would be basically the same people, and since a person can’t consume every single article, video, tutorial, etc … the more content, less effective it becomes.
See the following table of 5 content creators and their audience, ranked by popularity:
| Rank | Total Audience | Carried from previous creator | Distinct viewers |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 52 | N/A | N/A |
| 2 | 51 | 44 | 7 |
| 3 | 36 | 32 | 4 |
| 4 | 29 | 25 | 4 |
| 5 | 18 | 16 | 2 |
And yes, these number and this theory is based on nothing, but it’s my feeling that the more content there is, their number of viewership tends to zero.
I agree with every single proposal that got funded.
Now let’s assume ZecLand, instead of being a country, it’s an amusement park, all these 3 proposals brings something to the table:
This one is kind weird, what is technical or not?
I see own my proposal less technical, since it not intended to further Zcash protocol in any sense, but as a community, and a bit educational proposal. My mempool visualizer would be a visual tool for the community to understand the mempool and see minor statistics about the network.
I would even classify @hanh 's proposal as community based, since it’s offering more options to the community. He’s not developing anything, just offering infrastructure to us (at cost (sic)).
Let’s be honest, we’re in a bear market, $ZEC price isn’t what we would love it to be.
If you were responsible for marketing on an amusement park, you’d choose to pay ads on TV, viral marketing campaigns on the internet, etc … on low season or high season? Imagine a marketing director spending money on ad for a water park on winter? This guy should be fired immediately!
With Zcash, we’re in the same boat … speaking of boats …
Imagine Zcash as boat leaking water. Who would you prefer to be on board of this boat?
I have my pick 
.
I agree that inactive members should be removed from ZCAP, but this doesn’t make a lot of difference in the voting process. The quorum for approval is 51%, it makes no difference if 100 people of 500 voted, or 100 of 100, the quorum of 51 votes would be the same.
First of all, apologize my terrible English, if my text is somewhat unclear or non-sense please inform and I’ll try to answer in a better way.
Also, I understand that @gordonesTV is not against the proposals, he is only proposing improvements to the poccess. But I felt like writing why I support every single approved proposal, with a minor observation wrt halo2 verification one.
See you 
Where can we find the calculation formula for proposal approval?
I am also among the new ones! And precisely the idea is that since we have been taken into account for such an important responsibility, we will honor it by making proposals and improving more and more.
Thanks for reading me and for your comment. We are in agreement.
To be eligible for funding, a grant application must receive greater than 50% approval from the participants in the ZCAP poll. Eligible grants will then be funded in order of priority determined by the level of ZCAP’s approval, and as the total budget permits. There will be no partial funding of grants.
I don’t want to sound like a disgruntled member of how the voting ended up, my votes reflect the final result 
So “approval threshold” is Total Votes/2. All clear, thank you. Yes that way it doesn’t depend on the number of inactive members 
Thank you, @james_katz, por taking the time to read me and for giving your valuable opinion.
My English is not so good either, but that’s the richness of Zcash, that many languages and cultures converge.
I will answer you too, in no order.
I think your proposal is technical. Understanding technical as everything that has to do with development, cryptography, programming and technology itself. The educational or marketing is everything that seeks to inform, disseminate, train, make visible.
That is why I think that if in the future the proposals are to be classified according to my original writing, a previous revision must be made so that the filter is correctly applied.
Your Zecland proposal is interesting, but unfortunately it does not apply to the current reality of Zcash. Why? Because right now there is no sturation of educational/informative content about Zcash. You must know it yourself in your country, Brazil, which is immense and where with total certainty I can tell you that not all the states or cities of the country have been covered. That is to say, to continue making developments when there are still populations where they don’t even know what Zcash is? I think there must be a balance (the 2 oars I explained).
I reiterate what I said in my letter: I have nothing against the approved proposals, I think they are great and very necessary.
But what about Privacy Map and the ZecHub proposal, for example, aren’t they important?
Now, imagine Zecland, where there are brutal implementations and a state-of-the-art technological development, where only the same old users are the ones using Zcash, because there is no longer a ZecHub or a podcast that teaches, spreads or explains how to use this great technology. That still leaves Zcash as a niche cryptocurrency. Do we really want mass adoption? Mass adoption is not achieved with technology alone. Communities are a must, and the ambassador program (which is marketing/education, not development) becomes brutally important to that end.
I also do not think it is fair to consider the difference between technical (development) and educational (marketing) as a “conflict”.
Far from seeing it as a conflict, what I see is that we should all contribute ideas so that both can be developed and promoted equally within Zcash. Because otherwise, we will continue to have Zcash with a brutal technology, but with negligible adoption.
Imagine that Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Uruguay and Paraguay become active with Zcash, that they start holding events, meetups, that there are a couple more ambassadors and that proposals are made there. That would increase the use of Zcash! And that would slowly raise its market capitalization, etc, etc, etc, etc. We already know what happens when more people use a crypto.
Imagine another scenario: Zashi, the next Zcash baby. We will all be happy to have a new member in the family! But… And how are we going to make this baby known? How are we going to teach people how to use it? Or are we going to pretend that the same current Zingo and YWallet users will be the ones migrating to Zashi? Wouldn’t it be more strategic and intelligent on Zcash’s part to push marketing/education initiatives and proposals to keep teaching and spreading the word that we now have a new baby in the family?
Precisely, in a bear market is the time to prepare for when the upside comes.
You can’t nip marketing in the bud, you can minimize it, yes, but you can’t eliminate it because “it’s not in season”. That is precisely the mistake of companies and brands! And I say this with experience in the area in which I work.
The recent Minor Grants results were just that: we bet on development, but not on marketing/education. Not a single educational proposal was approved!
And yes, I understand that proposals are approved with 51% of the votes, but if everyone thinks like you, they will always vote for technical, and not educational. That is why I propose and suggest that a mechanism be sought so that both oars have equal opportunity. That will ensure that we are always pushing the best development proposals, but also the best educational and marketing proposals.
Forgive the length of my writing.
But I think this topic is very important and interesting, and we cannot explain or summarize it only in two lines.
Saudações! 
It is not about discontent. Neither am I.
But I am also thinking about the great educational proposals that were left out and that unfortunately we will have to wait we don’t know how long to see them.
We all know how powerful Zcash technology is. A cutting-edge technology, a model and example for many other projects seeking to benefit from the developments that have been achieved in Zcash.
I think that Zcash will always have a great technology and good developers concerned about its maintenance and constant improvements from ECC, ZF and third parties who care about keeping it that way.
Every year we see this and the interesting proposals that third parties present to the ZCG to continue on this path.
However, in the narrative of many people inside and outside Zcash, is that Zcash is a project for specialists, experts in technology, something advanced and not very accessible.
Since last year this narrative has been changing thanks to the Global Ambassador Program (GAP), ZecHub, Free2z, ZFAVClub and various projects focused on making the understanding and adoption of Zcash more user-friendly for the average user. The intention: to make using Zcash as easy and normal as using cash or a credit card, but better.
We all know that Zcash is better money, but how do we make it known and understood?
The only way is to continue to support, encourage and fund projects focused on educating, promoting and assisting in the adoption of Zcash.
You might think that with what we already have between the GAP, ZecHub, Free2z and ZFAVClub is enough and there is no need to do more to drive marketing or community building proposals.
Despite this, there is still a lot of work to be done in different parts of the world and in different languages to bring Zcash to as many people as possible.
The projects mentioned above (GAP, ZecHub, Free2z and ZFAVClub) cannot reach every corner of the planet and promote Zcash effectively if there are no other educational and marketing projects that collaborate closely with them, help them project their work, while complementing what they do by bringing new value.
Zcon4 was a good time to recognize the importance and necessity of the community, while continuing to support the high level academic and scientific technological developments in Zcash.
Therefore, I think it is a good time to continue talking about the best strategies for future ZCAP ballots in the ZMG to give the same relevance to development projects and projects focused on boosting the adoption of these developments in the community.
Balances are important and after the good results that have been demonstrated with the GAP, ZecHub, Free2z and ZFAVClub, I think we need to continue supporting new projects focused on the community, while continuing to drive great development,
Community is everything and communities have great power to transfrom and drive both narratives and technology adoption around projects like Zcash.
You really make good points here, but on marketing and education I can tell you we’re not even close to saturation.
We have to consider that we’re building a global community, and in some regions things can be different from others. We started working on this in my small town in Venezuela about four months ago, with our own resources, by our own iniciative.
Venezuela is a toddler when it comes to crypto and still, is one of those countries that would (and does) benefit a lot if their citizens learned about this financial alternatives.
We went from only two participants in our first talk to 22 in the last one, some of them started using Crypto in general, others adopted Zcash as a private mean of payment, and three of them are even active on Zechub and the Discord activities.
As you can see, even with the “flaws” in the tech side of the ecosystem, in some regions there’s people eager for alternatives, and if we have the knowledge and tools to tell them about those alternatives, they will come.
Maybe we could say the US Market is saturated because they have plenty of alternatives that work: Spedn (not Zcash), Coinsbee (Not Zcash), who knows, but in this descentralized environmet, in an interconnected era, two or three countries are not the whole world, and there’s a lot of work to do in other countries and people willing to learn and jump in.
Cheers
Not necessarily.
You don’t market things in the bear market, because no one is listening. The trend is your friend.
That’s because development for a development based protocol is/has/will be underwhelming under the current leadership.
You are falling for the proverb of putting the cart before the horse. The same reason why the Zcash media grant was (and still is) totally nonsensical. How can you promote something that has people every other week wondering where their funds went?
Zashi is a political move by ECC to justify their dev fund slice.
Just correcting myself.
Educational content can eventually get saturated (IMO). Currently it is not. We are far from saturation.
All educational and marketing efforts are more than welcomed!
Since ZF Minor Grants program seems to be a huge success, I’m pretty sure there will next rounds. By then hopefully more and more marketing/education proposals will be funded.
I can’t stress enough how many new people found about Zcash recently due to the efforts of the ambassadors program and Zcash Global / the ZCast podcast / ZecHub, and so on … I really believe in these projects.
The point I was trying to make originally was that I concur with the funded proposals. (with a little observation WRT to a specific one).
But I got carried away …
Let’s work together and make a more concise and fair polling! I’m open to new ideas!
And congrats to @gordonesTV for the initiative of trying to find a better solution for all this.
If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
I’ve been meaning to say this in a few places, but haven’t yet. I do not like the idea of removing people from ZCAP for not voting. I think ZCAP removal should be for people where there is some proof they are a bad faith actor. As was pointed out, people not voting doesn’t really have a negative effect. Instead, what I think would be a great idea, would be to reward people who participate. We could do RPGF for people with good voting track records (give people $ZEC for consistently voting), or we could incentivize governance participation by trying to promote to leadership positions the people with strong and good faith participation. Let’s use our creative thinking to try fun and positive ways to strengthen participation, not rigid and negative ways.
Greetings to all.
Certainly I have seen for days how the issue of subsidies has been discussed, and as a somewhat new member of the community I can say that for greater simplification or solution to this issue, and if possible, the subsidies can be divided into 2 categories.
Technical and Educational.
As most of us who use Crypto should know, beyond the bear market, the greater the use and promotion of Zcash, its adoption and therefore its price increases! But I consider the educational proposals as important as the technical ones. And I will talk about the educational ones because they are what make the end user know what they are doing in the Technical area.
And in summary I just want to give my point of view in that they must evaluate that educational proposals are also important for the general development of the community, and that they should have the same weight as any other type of proposal, and that if not it has weight Think about the end user, what use would all the extensive technological development be to us?
To your point: using Zcash shouldn’t have a learning curve. It should be as simple as gold or cash. I know how to use both but I don’t need “Zcash Media” to make hype videos about it.
Also – @nathan-at-least and @peacemonger want to know where you came from for their “research”.
Thank you!
Indeed, community is everything.
What is Zcash without its community, without a mass of users using and testing Zcash, but constantly growing?
That’s right! There is no educational and informational saturation, in fact, there never will be! Because there will always be new users to reach and inform about the basics, from scratch.
Why not? It would be interesting to know your arguments why you think that if more educational activities about Zcash are done in new countries and regions its adoption will not grow.
To say that “no one” is listening in a bear market is a mistake. It is not thinking strategically.
Education and marketing about Zcash should be done strategically, not viewed simply as a bear market.
Zashi is another topic, and we can discuss it as well.
And regarding Zcash Media, certainly, there are many things to clarify.
But none of the community proposals rejected in the recent Minor Grants, at least those of the Spanish community, are intended to be funded and not done. I can attest to that. Quite a lot we do in the Spanish Zcash community, the numbers and deliverables we have prove it.
Thanks, @james_katz
Certainly, new grant rounds will come, new ideas and new proposals will come, and these conversations are healthy to prepare us for what is to come.
Let’s go together!