Just out of interest, were any of the issues you highlighted in this post ever resolved?
Some relevant bits.
tromers summary of the grant committee issues
Half of the committee is controlled by “ZEC holders directly”. Such coin-weighted voting has severe problems. If these are two seats captured, then the others two seats don’t suffice to mitigate the damage (and there would be a deadlock on electing the 5th, technical member). That’s creates a very bad risk of capture, for a committee that controls the disbursement of many tens of millions of dollars. References:
More generally, I fear that the problem of conjuring an independent grant committee is basically the general “decentralized governance” problem in disguise, and we’re not going to solve it here either.
Another problem is the presence of an ECC member on the Grants Review Committe. This causes an unacceptable conflict of interests when awarding grants to ECC, and also for all other grants because they compete with ECC for funding.
(Recall that, in the rationale and design of ZIP 1012 , it is crucial that ECC can compete for Major Grants, in order to sustain its operations until concrete opportunities arise to create even greater value for the Zcash ecosystem. If ECC is not allowed to compete for Major Grants, then its dedicated slice needs to be much larger.)
Thus, unless and until a better solution to this governance problem is found, I reluctantly suggest to keep the weak language (“ZF shall strive to create an independent grant committee”) of ZIP 1012 , or similar. Or be more specific and prescribe, as @mlphresearch suggested , to compose an independent grant committee by a sentiment collection process, followed by final decision by the ZF board .
The helios question was based off this, right? so why are we even thinking about options? It is a great target but the only real people who can judge the merits of proposals are the ECC and ZFND, and the ECC will be applying for them.
maybe I am not getting the nuance between the options, but we either get experienced people or inexperienced people.
Again in regards to the vote, whatever the ZFND decided is the legitimate answer.