Hi Mikerah, these are really good questions.
First I should say that we might all be a bit more connected to each other than it seems! When I met @alchemydc at ETH Denver this year, we realized that we’d worked together on a campaign my previous organization Fight for the Future ran back when he was at Sendgrid. The campaign was called Reset the Net, and its goal was to increase awareness of secure communication tools and add layers of encryption to existing products, as a show of resistance to mass surveillance on the day marking the first anniversary of the Snowden revelations. That day, Sendgrid turned on encryption-in-transit for billions of emails per month! A long list of companies participated, but Sendgrid’s part in it was especially epic, so it was great to meet DC in person years later.
Soon after that, I worked with @cburniske’s colleague Joel Monegro on Fight for the Future’s (and Joel’s) first campaign site for net neutrality. I just googled it and the site Joel mostly made is still live! StopTheSlowLane.com. Their colleague Brad Burnham was a supporter of Fight for the Future and worked with us on several projects, from net neutrality, to stopping SOPA/PIPA, to a campaign called Bitcoin Black Friday that spread a positive holiday-themed story about cryptocurrency at a time when the dominant association was with crime. I went on CNBC to tell America you could buy Xmas trees with Bitcoin! (The campaign was a partnership with other folks who ran the site independently in later years, so our site is no longer up, but I’m still very proud of our logo 
)
All of this is a long way of saying that when you’re driven by similar underlying values or a similar spirit to things in your life’s work, your social and professional worlds intersect in surprising ways. Or when they don’t and you finally meet, you often find you have a lot in common! For example, I don’t think @sarahjamielewis and I have met in person yet, but we seem to think a ton about similar things from a similar perspective. I expect and hope she’ll be elected to the MGRC, and I hope we get to meet!
So I think whatever group gets elected is far from arbitrary, and while there definitely will be different perspectives represented I expected there will be strong common threads, both in our motivations and in our aspirations for Zcash.
To respond a bit more concretely about my experience:
- Almost all of my activism work has been in coalitions of groups, so I’m very comfortable in ad hoc groups meeting weekly outside their core teams to take on ambitious projects.
- Back in 2017 I was a judge for an activism prize called the Rodenberry Fellowship, though that was structured more in an individual way, where each judge read some subset of applications and voted with a point system.
- At Fight for the Future I co-created an grantmaking effort called A-Teams. In that case, we had a part-time person with experience running hiring processes in large organizations who pushed applicants through our review process and executed on our ideas to solicit more applications. That plus a weekly meeting to review applicants and refine the process was really effective for ensuring progress while the decisionmakers (my co-founder and I) were very busy with other work.
This is last example may be a good model for the MGRC: regular committee meetings (to discuss applicants at different stages, build and refine a process, and brainstorm ideas for reaching more people) with support from one or more full or part-time staff who are good at methodically working through a process and “managing up” to get the attention and follow-up they need from decisionmakers and other stakeholders.