I was one of the 119 voters and voted to have a separate MG organization.
It seems to me, based on the above, there are two separate decisions that need to be made:
1/ should we have a separate Major Grants organization?
2/ if so, how would it work exactly (membership, decision making, precise mandate, etc.)?
For 1, should we have a separate Major Grants organization?
I strongly believe the answer is YES and that the MG organization should be completely independent of ZF.** We need to move the community and protocol to be significantly more decentralized than it is today, and we need to make this decentralization an explicit goal. We need many more developers driving the protocol and in the ecosystem and imo working themselves out of a job entirely by dissolving. And as most of you know, the best way to get something done is to make sure there is a directly responsible party. Someone’s butt needs to be on the line to accomplish this significant decentralization.
Why not the ZF?
Organizations work best when they have clear and simple missions. We need an organization whose sole purpose is to decentralize the ecosystem and eventually itself dissolve once this sustainable decentralization has been achieved.
In my opinion, the ZF has a complementary and meaningful role to play (per their mission) around education, protocol development/governance, and technical development. It is not an explicit part of the ZF mandate, nor should it be, to decentralize the ecosystem to the point that the ZF itself is dissolved. This would complicate both the ZF’s mission and the Major Grant’s mission, and I hope the ZF exists for a long time on the other side of this next/final dev fund.
Additionally the existence of a third organization moves us one step closer to decentralization and a much more resilient protocol. No single entity controlling the majority of funding forces us to build important competencies in the community around communication, governance, negotiation across organizations, etc.
For 2, how should the MG organization work exactly?
This is the discussion I think we should have. However, we first need to align on whether to have the MG. Some may believe that we cannot decide whether to have a MG group if we don’t know how it will work. I disagree. I think we should not try to solve both how it will work and whether we should have it at once. We should first decide if we believe such an organization fulfills an important enough purpose to exist and then figure out how to execute on making it successful.
Figuring out the right structure for MG will take some effort – who gets elected, how they make decisions, constraints on concentration of funding, can the ECC or ZF receive any of that funding, etc. There are many important questions to sort out…but these are solvable problems if the community is aligned around the need for such an organization. I also believe, we have a long time before 2021 and can figure out how to stand up an independent MG organization.
In advance of the discussion of how an MG might work, I wanted to voice very strong support for the idea of a Major Grants organization independent of ZF as a big step towards a truly sustainable and decentralized protocol.