Thanks for explaining this case for full time MGRC members so vividly. I’ve been trying to form my opinions on this and I’m torn between two views of what the MGRC could be.
-
- MGRC as the driving actor. The members take this on as a full time job and set an innovative vision and plan in motion, using their budget to hire teams, contractors, adivsors, etc, as necessary to carry it out.
-
- MGRC as oversight and review. Developer teams, including for profit companies with entrepreneurial leaders and quick execution, set their own visions and apply for multi-year grants.
I think initially MGRC was conceived of as 2. The idea being that there’s already quite a talent pool of already-formed and experienced development teams that have, for example, worked on other cryptocurrency projects. I think of Parity as an example here but of course there are others. Small grants (presumably) wouldn’t appeal to them but longer term ones might be worth a strategic focus.
On the other hand, having an MGRC committee sit and wait for proposals to arrive may be just an unnecessary layer of indirection. Why not just find excellent MGRC members and empower them directly?
I’m still leaning towards thinking 2. is better. The threshold issue for me is about how likely the MGRC is to work well effectively. We set that the committee is 5 ppl and roughly how they’re elected. They’ll be a committee that most likely have not all worked together before. I believe that zip1014 does not even specify if they each get individual responsibility for 1/5 of the fund or if they have to decide by majority vote, for example. Based on this, I think one of the most important criteria for choosing MGRC members is that they are likely to work well with the other elected members.
The teams applying for the grants, in contrast, get to come with their own varied governance structures already in place, hopefully ones that have already been battle tested and shown to be highly effective.