Folks, I’m glad we’re talking about this! Thanks to Shawn, Gareth, Aristarchus, Howard, Vires_Num3ris, root, ChileBob, treasonous, dontbeevil, mistfpga, etc for bringing it up and posting thoughtful ideas.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot because, as Shawn correctly points out, we need to plan ahead. Not only does the Network Upgrade Pipeline require about sixteen months to develop and deploy changes to the protocol, and not only does the Electric Coin Company need a multi-year runway in order to plan and to continue our operations, but so do miners, partners, and potential partners like exchanges, wallets, OpenBazaar, etc. etc. Not to mention coin-holders! Everyone benefits from knowing what will happen at least a year in advance and being able to plan for it.
A couple of weeks ago in New York City at Blockchain Week, the Electric Coin Company had conversations with as many Zcash community members as we could. It ended up being about a dozen meetings (with individuals or organizations) with a broad swath of the pro-Zcash people in the cryptocurrency industry (none of whom are active on this forum). We talked with them about the evolution of Zcash, the cybercoins space in general, where we think we can best serve the interests of the community and the project, and asked them if they would support a new Dev Fund. The results were that there was clear and strong support from this set of people for ongoing funding of development of Zcash but that about half of the people also said that a new Dev Fund should be more decentralized.
What “more decentralized” means, exactly, of course is different things to different people, but the common theme is that about half the people — and also me personally — think it is important for the long-run future of Zcash that the next stage is less reliant on a single organization.
The biggest conclusions that I take from this is that Electric Coin Company cannot lead this discussion. No matter how broad the real community support is in favor of a given plan, if the Electric Coin Company was the one who originally proposed the plan and led the discussion, then observers from afar will (reasonably-enough) suspect that this wasn’t a real, organic, decentralized decision.
In order to communicate to the broader set of interested observers that what gets decided is a legitimate expression of community support, it’s going to be up to non-ECC-affiliated persons to lead the discussion. That’s why I’m so grateful to Shawn, Gareth, et al. that I mentioned above for starting the conversation and driving it forward already.
The hard part is going to be the “decision procedure”. Any and all proposals will face fierce and vocal opposition (and judging from my conversations in New York last week, the “do nothing and let development be defunded” option will be one of the most fiercely opposed of all!), so there must be some procedure by which the community decides to do a thing despite strong opposition.
The decision procedure also must allow for coordination — it has to allow a very large, very diverse set of people, each of who individually and privately support a given proposal, to find out that everyone else in the group also supports the same proposal, and to let everyone know that everyone else knows that everyone supports it. This is harder than you’d think. 
For example, I estimate that about 95% of the people in that set — the set of people worldwide who have a major stake in Zcash either financially, in terms of their business plans, or in terms of their political and social convictions — are not reading this forum. So this forum has to be only the seed of the procedure.
Although the Electric Coin Company isn’t the right organization to lead the conversation, we stand ready to help and to answer any questions that we can. As our recent Transparency Report shows, we’re well-staffed, committed, and we consistently deliver world class R&D, engineering, security support, education, government outreach, partnership development, etc.
Again, I’m really grateful to the community members who’ve already stepped up to draw attention to this pivotal issue! It’s thanks to people like you that the Zcash project is further decentralizing and going to the next level in its mission!