Major Grants committee

Hi,

As someone pretty heavily involved in the process I empathise with the difficulty following what is/was going on. It is spread over quite a few threads and probably thousands of posts. Some really good summaries are in the hangouts.

As zooko stated above there is a large amount of fatiuge in the community over this subject, but decisions should still be talked over. Please understand though it is too late for major (or any at all really) changes.

A good place to catch up on the discussion and decision making would be here:
(it is not 7 hrs long, it is about 3hrs, but the hangout didnt end properly)

Here is the second hangout:

I timestamped the second hangout in this post.

and the most recent one:

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this is wildly inaccurate.

no thanks.

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Beside the aforementioned summary calls, the bulk of the debate happened within the forum threads of the individual proposals (including withdrawn ones) listed in Future of Zcash dev funding — megathread / everything in one place , followed by the two polling rounds.

Sorry, but these are many thousands of discussion comments, and to see all the nuances discussed (and why people are fatigued) you’d have to read those…

The bottom line is that among the many proposals and ideas considered, there were quite a few involving new legal entities and reserved board positions of various sorts. Both in formal draft ZIPs, and informally suggested in discussion comments. Some of these were withdrawn or abandoned by their authors due to unresolved major issues. Some made it to the first poll and did not garner support. None passed both filters.

So you see, it’s not that we aren’t taking the idea seriously. It’s that we already took it seriously, and discussed it during most of the past year. You’re looking at the endgame. Which is not to say we can’t continue the discussion that you and @lex_node are calling for, but please see my suggestion for how to proceed above.

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This sounds very much like the Major Grants committee of ZIP 1014.

With the important disambiguation that these are not “investments” meant to turn up profit for investors, but rather resources allocated to achieve the ecosystem’s broad goals and values. For example, improving Zcash’s privacy tech, or strengthening decentralization by creating an independent node implementation, may not have capturable monetary value. Such public goods may be terrible “investments” in the sense of making money. And yet, they would be high on the priority list. Zcash Foundation’s mission and values statements are good inspiration here.

Most of the ZCash Angels will be people who already lead cutting edge blockchain companies and crypto investment firms

ZIP 1014, and ZF’s proposed amendments thereto, call for election of the Major Grants committee by the community. I indeed hope to see candidates who have pertinent market and tech background, and in particular the ability to judge and guide successful execution!

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My humble opinion is that the Major Grants Committee should consist of established community members who are not ECC or ZF employees or shareholders (for ECC), nor potential Major Grants proposers, in order to avoid collusion and bias.

Also, I advocate for not paying Committee members, in order to avoid any financial interest but attract just those who really want to contribute, as long as there is no significant workload required.

The enumeration matter should highly depend on the work hours required. If it’s like a full time (or even part time) job, then of course some significant salary should be offered since members would have to devote serious time and commitment in order to fulfill their duties and take time off their regular jobs.

I’m sure many community members will disagree with my views and that’s perfectly fine. Take it for what it is. My humble opinion as a community member like you :slight_smile:

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What if we offered performance incentives to the MG committee, where they get to “invest” individually by allocating a portion of their MG Slice portfolio, and where their portfolio gets evaluated for impact after the fact?

I’ve been watching some Dragon’s Den recently, and thinking about how good a Crypto Dragon’s Den would be. It’s fun to watch a panel of knowledgeable and public speaking experts break down the startup pitches and get to the important parts. Maybe something like this would work here. At the least it may be a way to attract a different set of folks (like VCs and thought leaders) to participate effectively.

Who’d do the evaluation? This does just add an other layer of indirection, since now the trust bottleneck is on after the fact performance evaluation. But, this sort of post hoc evaluation is arguably better suited to a committee, while the initial choice of “investments” may be better suited to individuals. So using advisory panel for this could be effective.

What incentives? If the MG Dragons are compensated for their time, then this amount could scale a bit with the post hoc evaluation as a bonus. The reputation effect of being able to take credit for their individual portfolios also acts like an additional incentive.

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@amiller, this is a fascinating idea! But is it suitable for Major Grants, of which we expect to be very few ongoing ones (initially: probably fewer than the number of MG committee members)?

Also, I think it will be very difficult to do the evaluation of success. Some parts do become easier, like checking whether concrete milestones were delivered. But how would people judge in retrospect whether a successfully-built website, or a successfully-organized workshop, or an improvement to a cryptographic protocol, were really “worthwhile”? The passage of time doesn’t necessarily make it easier, and it does involve the whims of changing public taste which are not the committee’s member “fault”. After all, we don’t have objective measures (dollar PnL and valuations) to go by.

Also:

the initial choice of “investments” may be better suited to individuals

Why? I’m concerned it would reduce the quality of the evaluation. In particular, it will make personal interests much more of an issue. Especially in our heavily interlinked ecosystem, and given that funding of MG recipients would be far greater than an MG committee’s retroactive-evaluation stake.

Lastly, as usual: if this is going to be a long discussion, let’s open a dedicated thread. :slight_smile:

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Thinking about what the MG Committee will actually have to do…

Applications for funding will be public so they’ll be discussed by all… ie: ZFND, ECC, fans, trolls, experts & idiots… just like everything else is around here.

Presumably the MG Committee just acts as a jury, extracting signal from loud & public noise to reach a conclusion. They won’t have to be experts in every field.

I quite like this - it’ll be easy for all to contribute and it doesn’t matter who they work for (ie: ECC/ZFND).

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Who is we?
Given what information do you think it will be the case?

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I think it’s unlikely to play out this way. Evaluating large grants requires a lot of effort: understanding the proposal, researching context (e.g., are there alternatives? how risky are the dependencies?), discussion time, evaluating revisions, etc. Few people are inclined to put in such effort voluntarily.

To give some examples from within our own ecosystem:

  • In ZF’s previous grant program, I think the majority of GitHub comments were by the members of the grant review committees (or the proposers replying to them).
  • ECC’s ECC R&D and Engineering Flight Plan did not get any feedback, other than mine.
  • ZF’s Engineering Roadmap 2020 also got little feedback (the most substantial of which was by rex4539, who I guess was continuing the momentum from his role on the grant review committee :smiley:) .

So my expectation is that the MG committee members will need enough expertise to take the lead on analyzing proposals. Of course they’ll draw on the community, and reach out for advice (as the old grant committee did), but even doing that effectively requites sufficient understanding.

Notably, this isn’t just about technical expertise. Knowledge in finances, marketing, regulation, etc. may also be called for, and ideally the committee will have some of these too. (Again, by example: ZF is lucky to count @valkenburgh among its board members, and ECC is fortunate to have Andrew McLaughlin on its board.)

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First, math. At the current coin price, if we had 5 equal-sized MG recipients, and kept say 25% of the MG slice as a reserve against volatility, then each recipient would get less than $1M/year. That seems far less than people had in mind, in the discussions of the Major Grant system and how it would create major new players undertaking roles on the scale of ECC. (And recall that ZF’s existing grant system will continue to serve smaller grants.)

Second, so far I haven’t seen indications that many teams of the requisite size and interests exist; I know of just 2.

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I think that’s an important point.

Expertise (in multiple areas) is definitely needed to avoid inefficiencies, especially given the relative size of the MG slice.

We can take ZFND’s Zebra project as an example.
I think that one reason for its inefficiency (the need for a rewrite) was the lack of expertise.

Nice - agree with a lot of that :slight_smile:

I still think committee members will rely on ‘the community’ when a subject moves away from their area of expertise. At least, that’s what I would hope… if I had a tough cryptography problem, I would ask!

We’re certainly going to need bright, capable & experienced folks - but ‘general specialists’ dont exist.

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The above straw poll about MG committee compensation shows an overwhelming majority for the “for their reasonable time and expenses” option, currently with approval by 77% of the voters. The runner up option (which would also allow ZF to provide that compensation) got approval by 26% of the voters. Just 7.7% (two voters) did not approve of either option.

My Commits · tromer/zips · GitHub git branch now implements this. Along with the removal of USD cap, some cleanups, and implementing ZF’s proposed MG changes. (The latter are the last commit, so easy to remove or modify).

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I would like to better understand the argument behind the following (@acityinohio @tromer, tagging for attention but of course anyone is welcome to reply):

New Section 7: Initially the ZF SHALL appoint the members of the Major Grant Review Committee and the ZF SHALL have authority to change or modify the Committee’s membership. To align with the Future Community Governance timeline (more on that below), the terms and election structure for members of the Major Grant Review Committee SHALL be decided in a new ZIP and ratified by the ZF Community Panel (or successor mechanism) no later than the end of 2021.

Why not simply use the Advisory Panel + Forum poll for identifying the MG review committee members in open elections right before the new dev fund is created? 20+ months for putting together a simple ZIP for that (plus a couple of competing proposals, if any) and having a public discussion on their relative merits feels a bit excessive, no?

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Good point, and the tone didn’t add value anyway. Thanks for highlighting this.

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It’s ~23 months in the current proposal. I suggested changing it to ~17 months (i.e. end of June 2021).

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(ZIP Editor hat) PR 319 now reflects the changes on @tromer’s no-cap-with-comp branch.

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That’s more than it took the community to arrive from the initial new dev fund forum thread (January 2019, if I remember correctly) to where it is today.

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There is no technical reason for the “20+ months”. Don’t forget, the majority of the community could also have voted for option B and the Major Grant Review Committee should have been implemented before NU4 activation.

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