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!