POLL: ZOMG Unofficial Community Poll đź“Š

Not sure what the question means…

What if I’d like the ZF to work towards a solution but I don’t agree with their current approach?

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Is this the Zcash Community Forum or the Zcash Foundation Forum?

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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. :slight_smile: (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…)

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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.

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So do I @Shawn. Thank you for bringing my request to ZF’s attention. :slight_smile:

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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.

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Very interesting opinion, @earthrise. I love opinions that widen the Overton Window. :slight_smile: Instead of an Overton Window between $500 per month and $2000 per month per ZOMG committee member, how about 87.5 ZECⓩ per month (i.e. $13,125/month at today’s price of ZEC)!?

I came up with “87.5 ZECⓩ” because that’s the amount of ZEC per each of the 5 ZOMG Committee Member if we adopted your suggestion of 10% of the ZOMG budget being allocated for committee members and staff, and then if the ZOMG decided to spend ½ of it on committee members and ½ of it on staff. Then each of the five committee members would receive 87.5 ZECⓩ per month for their service.

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.

I wonder if we can gather data from comparables. Can we find out how many staff are employed by the Ethereum Foundation’s grant programs and how much money they manage each year and about how much the Ethereum Foundation spends to attract and retain them each year? How about the Solana Foundation grants, or Algorand Foundation grants?

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.

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Zooko is correct, ZF owns and operates this forum, I work as a contractor for the ZF.

https://forum.zcashcommunity.com/tos

Thank you for the positive feedback :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

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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.

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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.

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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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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!

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I would much prefer money be going to talented staff rather than PoW miners…

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I would support a commission based approach to the pay as well, to incentivize work regardless of the hours put in.

I was bringing up salary in other comments, but the right commission would be easy for people to understand, more time equals more pay theoretically.

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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.

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Reminder: If you have not already done so, please complete this independent, unofficial community poll about ZOMG. Thanks!

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How about 20-40 hours a week plus more resources. :slight_smile:

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Reminder: Please do not forget to participate in this poll. It would be great to have at least 90 respondents (which is the number of respondents in the most recent ZCAP poll). We’re almost there!

Thank you to everyone who already participated!

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I posted a related note on my position, in case anyone wants to have a read. The post is about deferring the elections:

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Reminder: If you have not already done so, please take the time to participate in this community sentiment poll. Given everything that has recently transpired, these questions are still very relevant.

Thank you to everyone who already participated!

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I think that it’s clear that the experience and insight gained by the Original Gangsta @ZcashGrants
is a non-fungible, extremely valuable, resource that the community should leverage.

I think it’s obvious and uncontroversial that the OG ZOMG is competent and ethical.

Given the above what do I believe would be best for the community?

I think we should listen to them and adopt their recommendations, particularly where they are unanimous.

@secparam @zooko @tromer @hanh @dodger @amiller @alchemydc etc. are brilliant people and I have profound respect for their skills/insights, but a major feature of the ZOMG is to expand the set of voices that are providing us with insight-and-perspective.

We did a great job a recruiting a set of 5 perspectives and they now have the most immediate insight available into how the ZOMG might succeed.

Proposals For Benefitting From OG ZOMG Insight:

  • Craft polls that only the OG ZOMG members can respond to.
  • Ask the OG ZOMG to publish unanimous recommendations they have for the future of the ZOMG.
    This can be a distillation of individual OG ZOMG perspectives published elsewhere. I recognize that @cburniske’s post has many opinions/insights… can it be distilled to those points that the other Four unanimously ratify? Can it be made into, or have an Official ZOMG Position made from- it?
  • Pay the OG ZOMG ZEC for enduring an extremely chaotic first year. They should be compensated for the work they’ve already done!
  • Create advisory positions such that veterans of the ZOMG experience can elect to remain engaged with the current ZOMG.
  • Encourage the OG ZOMG to remain on the ZOMG in whatever ways we can.
  • Ask the OG ZOMG to review, modify, and ratify-or-not e.g. the ZF’s / @dodger 's proposal for restructuring the ZOMG. I have a less informed perspective on e.g. @dodger 's proposals, or @zooko’s proposals. The OG ZOMG has the insight, let them decide.
  • Brainstorm other ways to learn from their experience.
    What’s the right question to put to the OG ZOMG?
    What’re the insights they have?
    How do we collect data from the experiment?

We elected the OG ZOMG to help us figure this stuff out, for Pity’s Sake let’s listen to them, even perhaps give them some extra attention relative to some of the more traditional influencers in the space.

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