Major Grants Review Committee Candidates MEGATHREAD

[dontbeevil]

Found some replies in the old thread - that seems relevant.

@tromer

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.

@tromer

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 ) .

So my expectation is that the MG committee members will need enough expertise to take the lead on analyzing proposals.

@tromer

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