Hello,
Request to revoke Justin Ehrenhofer Zcap seat, his invites and his invites’ invitee please.
Let’s keep Zcash governance out of nefarious individual.
Perhaps ZF should create a process to remove members for cause (e.g. by petition or vote)?
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ZCAP needs to be able to police its own membership. Right now there are no checks that invitee is actually interested in well-being of Zcash. Simple internal vote to expel a particular member sounds like a good idea to me.
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Could you also review how and who invited “needmoney90”. Just like Justin, he’s a monero community mod.
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I know that Jehrenhofer is continuously critical of Zcash, casts it as inferior to other private assets, and makes points that a significant portion of the community disagree with. I have also seen him in monero Twitter spaces. He just thinks it’s superior and it’s hard to persuade him otherwise. He thinks every TX should be z2z and that the existence of t addresses are a threat to Zcash anonymity. If he actually engaged in the forums here and had healthy debate with the community I would be less pessimistic about him. However, I do not think casting out specific individuals because they speak critically of a project is a good idea. He does post some support for his arguments. I do however feel that ZCAP membership could benefit from some requirement that incentivizes members to engage constructively here on the community forums instead of continuously bashing the project on Twitter. If you don’t want to engage constructively here, then fine. You lose your ZCAP seat.
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As someone who is rather active here and could not get a seat, seeing a person like this abusing his privilege, I do not know what to say.
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Its unfortunate you and others didn’t get invited but you’re looking at it the wrong way. The ZCAP is an attempt at a sybil resistant method for gathering community consensus. It’s a non-binding input that the board will take into consideration just like if you were to look at the polls and come here and post how you would have voted and why, ZCAP doesn’t even have to attest their reasoning. Your input may not be tallied but it certainly doesn’t count for nothing.
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I don’t think his post was about him personally not being heard (@tokidoki correct me if I’m wrong ). It was about the image of ZCAP.
What kind of message does his situation send to a person that might be looking to start actively participating in Zcash community?
That the ZFND goals and values aren’t a bunch of phooey?
I would conclude the opposite. Let’s role-play. I am a newbie eager to get involved in Zcash. I discover that someone that regularly shits on Zcash is way above me in community structures. Convince me why I shouldn’t just give up on engaging with those structures completely.
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I don’t think of it that way. The ZCAP is not a means of one-upmanship, theres no special authority granted so yeah, you might consider not engaging in those power structures because I don’t think they actually exist.
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That is a terribly defeatist attitude. If we can’t convince ourselves that participating in Zcash is pointful, how can we expect to convince anyone?
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I think this is a great point. What’s the point of participating if those who participate (and was given a seat on the table) does not really care about the game they are supposed to play? They will just turn off others who are curious about the project.
Is Justin Ehrenhofer providing the Zcash community constructive criticism or is he being overtly negative / a troll? Below is a sample of his recent tweets about Zcash. Decide for yourself.
But Ehrenhofer aside, in my opinion, ZCAP / ZF should have a process in place, whether by petition or vote, to remove existing members of ZCAP whose presence does the community more harm than good. You could even have a supermajority requirement in place if you wanted to ensure removal was limited to the worst of the worst cases.
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What makes you think his vote would be different from yours? I mean the worst he could do is abstain right?
In one of his tweets :-
I know I’m probably considered a troll in the Zcash community at this point
I doubt he’d be surprised if something bad happened to his status.
Agree there should be a process, its an unpleasant thing but eventually necessary.
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The ZFND administers the ZCAP and they surely see this so like the Helios poll they’ll probably take that into consideration but I think them pruning anyone is gonna be based on whether they’re still active or not and not because we want to gerrymander the vote. Participating in Zcash is pointful when you realize the point is what you make of it.
I don’t think anyone in this thread wants to “gerrymander the vote.” Not sure why you’d say that. Having a fair process in place to remove existing members of ZCAP whose presence does the community more harm than good would be beneficial to the community as a whole.
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I broadly agree with this sentiment.
I, too, have reservations about Justin’s motivations for involving himself in the Zcash community.
The line between genuine criticism and trolling can be a very fine one, and the difference can be very subjective. I think it would be unwise to “kneejerk” exclude anyone who is critical of Zcash. Dissent and criticism can be constructive, it can serve to challenge our assumptions, and it can be a sign of a healthy, diverse community.
However, I agree that we should have a process for excluding individuals who don’t engage constructively, and I don’t believe that the Zcash Foundation should be the sole arbiter, as it opens us up to accusations of seeking to influence the ZCAP’s decisions by excluding or removing members who disagree with the Foundation.
We recently invited suggestions and ideas for expanding ZCAP, and I think it makes sense to simultaneously consider how to ensure that ZCAP remains a useful and representative method of soliciting community feedback, so I’m going to change the title of this topic accordingly, and request that people post their suggestions here regarding if and how we should expel existing ZCAP members.
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I believe 3 aspects are legit ground for member removal from ZCAP:
- Inactivity
- Hostility
- Identity (or lack thereof). Pseudonymity is totally cool but identity abuse is not.
Expanding on the above, here are some suggestions on removing members from ZCAP:
- Abstain for over some period (e.g. 2 years) in the voting process. Technically, is this feasible? Each member vote need to be checked against their ZCAP seat for it to be legit, right?
- Inactive in the community forum (or any place where it is considered to be a common room for everyone to discuss matters related to Zcash) for over a given period (e.g. 2 years).
- Constant disrespect towards the project and people involved (users, developers, community members etc.) with unwillingness to engage according the CoC (for example in the forum)
- Proof of Identity abuse such as Sybil attack or Identity theft
In order to make sure that ZF does not become the sole arbiter, we can periodically do “member removal” poll alongside “new member” poll. Is it feasible to consider such poll in the upcoming voting period?
Edit: Clarified my stance on pseudonimity.
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