The below is an unofficial poll related to ZOMG. If you haven’t been following the recent discussions, please read Chris’ and Zooko’s threads to familiarize yourself with the issues. I know the questions aren’t phrased perfectly, but please select the answers that best reflect your opinion.
This is an independent community poll. I did not seek advice or feedback from anyone affiliated with ECC, ZOMG, or the Zcash Foundation.
I hope that everyone will participate so this poll adequately reflects community sentiment.
Question #1: Which of the following would you like to see occur?
ZOMG be granted more independence and authority
ZOMG be scrapped so we can try something different
ZOMG be structured roughly the same; there is no need to change it
0voters
Question #2: What would make ZOMG more effective?
ZOMG committee members increasing their time commitment from 5 hours per month to 20 hours per month
Zcash Foundation (ZF) providing more resources to support ZOMG (so that committee members do not need to increase their time commitment).
0voters
Question #3: ZOMG committee members are currently paid $500 for 5 hours of work per month. If committee members increased their time commitment to 20 hours per month, would you support a corresponding pay increase to $2,000 per month?
Yes
No
0voters
Question #4: ZOMG is currently limited to using its funds for issuing grants; operational resources are provided by ZF. Would you support an amendment to ZIP 1014 that allows ZOMG to use its own funds (subject to an annual $ cap) to hire contractors for administrative and operational support, if needed?
Yes
No
0voters
Question #5: Would you support an amendment to ZIP 1014 to make ZOMG a fully independent third entity?
Yes
No
0voters
Question #6: Are you a ZCAP member?
Yes
No
0voters
FN1: Question #1 was originally posted by @amiller in early August. Only 24 people voted, so I posted it again.
FN2: Thank you to @wobbzz for his input and feedback.
I don’t believe this poll gives respondents the option to express support for the Foundation’s plans to resolve the issues raised by Chris, as detailed in my response to his topic.
Should the Zcash Foundation progress with its plan to address the issues highlighted by Chris?
It’s owned by the Zcash Foundation, and as far as I can tell it is mostly operated and moderated and made good by Shawn, the unsung community hero. (At one point in the past the Zcash Foundation was paying Shawn for his time — I don’t remember if that was for his moderator duties here on the Forum or something else…)
Thanks for clarifying, I don’t think pinning a poll for a few days should be something that needs ZF approval but if they own it they can do what they want I guess.
And @Shawn, hero is an understatement, really appreciate all of the work you do in this community.
ZOMG members should be paid far, far more than $2,000 a month, and we should consider making the seats a full-time position. Imagine trying to run an organization with as much responsibility as ECC or the Zcash Foundation on just 5 to 20 hours a month while earning less than 1% of the funds you’re responsible for allocating!
A ZOMG that makes good forward-thinking decisions will need world-class people making ZOMG their primary focus. A more reasonable number, in my opinion, would be to allocate a full 10% of all the ZOMG’s ZEC towards funding the members and supporting staff.
Maybe that’s too much! Or maybe it’s just right for the current competitive environment and for the type of highly-demanded people that we want to serve. I don’t know.
If we are asking people to do work at a similar skill-level and a similar effort-level, and take responsibility for a similarly humongous amount of money, while paying them dramatically less than our competitors pay, then I think we should expect worse results than our competitors get. On the other hand if those other projects are roughly in the same ballpark as our current plan, then that would be a substantiating data point.
We certainly can pay ZOMG members more. The original salary was set on the idea they’d be reviewing grants. All the issues with ZOMG stem from a simple problem : there were not a large number of qualified grant applications. ZOMG was conceived for a purpose it never got to serve. So it should come as no surprise there’ve been issues.
Now that we know that, we can change it’s purpose. The question we are left with is how.
Clearly we need one or two people to look for projects and actively recruit and develop them for funding. Those people need to be full time and paid.
But, I’m unsure if its feasible for that to be ZOMG members themselves. Certainly throwing money at the issue will not solve it. The problem would be finding 5 very qualified people who can work full time and get along is going to be a major tall order. Worse, they have to run and get elected by the forum on a yearly basis. It’s a recipe for not getting talent no matter the pay.
A perhaps more practical idea is hirer full time people and have ZOMG approve or reject the proposals they bring in. And no one at ZOMG or ZFND is opposed to doing that last I checked and its totally possible within the current structure.
That’s what I’ve proposed a couple of days ago: a hierarchical structure. A hierarchical structure will make ZOMG more open and flexible. In particular it allows anyone to participate - currently ZOMG can’t/isn’t using the clearly available resources (just look at all the people regularly posting on this forum) and in parallel you can chose to hire full time people in the way you’ve proposed it.
Let’s take a step back and think about what ZOMG needs in order to make good decisions for Zcash in the long run. I’m agnostic to whether these skills should be fulfilled by seat-holders or supporting staff who inform the seat-holders, but what’s clear to me is that we need to attract the kinds of people whose alternatives are to be CEOs or CTOs or highly successful investors, meaning their time is worth a lot more than the community seems to be considering. @zooko’s calculation of 87.5ZEC/month or $13,125/month above sounds totally reasonable to me, maybe even a little low. Here’s what ZOMG needs to be able to do:
Understand and be immersed in the wider crypto ecosystem, being able to come up with good guesses about what will be successful in that market and paying close attention to competing projects. If ZOMG lacks this, Zcash fails to compete with other projects or fails to market itself within the crypto space. Given the amount of projects out there, this alone is probably a full-time job for one person.
Understand the wider market (beyond crypto) and have ideas for how to compete with established payment processors (PayPal, VISA, etc.) so that Zcash is accepted by more stores, so that it’s accessible so that disadvantaged communities like sex workers can earn an income safely, or so that it can be used by people for any of the (probably thousands of) use cases I’m failing to imagine. Without this, changes to Zcash made by ZOMG may be wasteful by not targetting clear marketing opportunities.
Understand the deep technical details of proposed grants and weigh their utility against implementation costs and protocol complexity costs, and to also be aware of other, potentially better, solutions to the same technical challenge. Lacking this, ZOMG may fund technically inadequate projects or build one thing when they could have built something much better.
Have leadership and communication skills needed to negotate with the community and especially ECC and Zfnd. Without this, ZOMG won’t be able to make changes to the consensus rules.
Have enough expertise in UX and Security to ensure grant applicants have these skills or to provide assistance with them. Without this, ZOMG funds insecure projects or unusable projects.
There’s probably a lot more that I’m missing, but my point is ZOMG members should be a lot closer to “CEOs” than to “grant approvers.” If we want ZOMG chair-holders to come to their own independent decisions, they each need to be qualified in all of these areas, which will be really expensive! It makes sense that a lot of this work can be allocated to supporting staff or even the community, especially the market research, security, and technical evaluation, but even then, ZOMG members need the competence to select and hire those people, which is still worth a lot!
Gathering data from comps and then fine tuning the number seems like a more sound approach than gathering guesses and assumptions. For instance, I guessed —or assumed—that gathering comps was where we got the $500 to begin with. Now I guess I was wrong.
I’m good enough at math to recognize that math can be a great tool to improve results.
(At one point in the past the Zcash Foundation was paying Shawn for his time — I don’t remember if that was for his moderator duties here on the Forum or something else…)