Hi Paige,
As an infrequent reader of the forum, but a person with a long-standing interest in Zcash, I wonder if you and your colleagues might consider the following:
I try to update my zcashd every 6 months or so, and occasionally boot up my openbazaar store to see if I can generate any sales in Zcash. I check the exchange rate occasionally, also. I bought into the whole zerocoin/zcash idea relatively early, and I am not a large holder of any particular currency, but it seemed like the professionalism and expertise of the Zcash/ECC team would give it a great potential for success. I am saying this to provide some context for where my opinions are coming from.
Anyway, I find a lot of the communications on this forum difficult to understand because of a rather heavy use of jargon – it is not even jargon – but a shorthand which over emphasizes code-names or specialized terms which are part of some kind of brand identity.
For example, your post mentions an “Arborist team”. Since the releases of zcashd seem to have tree-related code names (Sprout, Sapling, etc), I would infer that the “Arborist team” may be a group of developers responsible to validating the latest release, but I don’t know. Are there another teams of “Grounds-keepers” or “Pest-management team” or “Irrigation” also? Do you get my point? The name, “Arborist team”, is kind of cute and it probably does something within ECC to build team cohesion or identity, but it is rather confusing to an outsider without some context.
One way of dealing with this might be to provide some additional, redundant, language when you use these short-hand names for things. For example, you could say, “The pre-release validation team, “Arborist Team”, will …” or something like that. Honestly, I would find this helpful when you refer to the “Sprout” and “Sapling” or other milestone releases, too. I don’t know which is the earlier or the later release, and if you included a little redundant information such as a numeric release number, it would help when I go to check my zcashd to see which version I am running, or when I have to google to find out why I can’t transfer between a “Sprout” and a “Sapling” shielded address (maybe I have the names wrong here; but this is something I recently encountered when I had different versions of zcashd running on different machines.).
In addition to casual users like myself, you might also consider the intelligibility of these code names to non-native-English speakers.
All the best,
pbtc