Hey everyone,
I want to share something I’ve been building and get honest feedback from the community before taking it further.
The Problem
The current grants experience is fragmented:
Grant applications live as GitHub Issues — great for transparency, but painful to browse, filter, or track
DAODAO handles governance but has no grants-specific UX
There’s no single place to see grant status, milestones, disbursements, committee activity, or analytics at a glance
For applicants, committee members, and community reviewers alike, the workflow feels like it was bolted together — because it was.
What I Built:
ZcashGrantHub — a read-first, community-focused grants dashboard that pulls live data directly from the ZcashCommunityGrants GitHub repo.
Key features so far:
Grant browser — filter by status, category, sort by amount or date; all data fetched live from GitHub Issues
Grant detail page — overview, team, budget breakdown, milestones progress, risk assessment, discussion (GitHub comments mirrored), and documents — all in one place
Analytics dashboard — applications per month, category breakdown (donut chart), treasury balance trend, top applicants by requested amount
Application feature — 10-step form mirroring the official grant_application.yaml template
How It Was Built:
I want to be fully transparent: I used Lovable AI to scaffold the initial UI in a single session, then iterated heavily in Cursor AI to wire up real GitHub API data, remove all the boilerplate, make it mobile-responsive, and align everything with the actual ZCG grant structure.
The total calendar time was very short — a day or two of focused sessions. I think this is actually the story worth telling: with modern AI-assisted tooling, a senior engineer can take a community pain point from idea to working prototype extremely quickly. The question is whether the idea is worth investing more time in.
What I’m Looking For:
Is this useful? Would grant applicants, committee members, or community reviewers actually use this?
What’s missing? What features would make this a genuine improvement over the current GitHub Issues workflow?
Should this become a ZCG grant? If there’s appetite, I’d consider formalizing this as a proper grant application — adding write capabilities (submit/update applications), committee tooling, milestone payment tracking, and DAODAO integration.
Data accuracy — if you’ve submitted a grant before, does your grant parse correctly from the GitHub Issue? Edge cases in the markdown/YAML parser are expected.
The project is open source. Happy to share the repo link with anyone interested.
Preview:
Thanks for reading. Feedback of any kind is welcome — especially critical feedback.
i really like the specific grant view your version has - all the details.
? I am really a bit tired with “too techie design” and “discord” screen model, the current Zcash community I feel friendly, authentic, inclusive and approachable.. Maybe I am just a vintage type 
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