Hi all, so there’s been a bunch of drama over ZOMG, some calls for restructuring everything RIGHT THIS INSTANCE, and some other proposals for smaller changes. All of this, however, misses some key context. ZOMGs purpose changed, but the way it worked hasn’t yet.
We need to understand a key thing: the root cause of ZOMGs problems is it was setup for the wrong purpose. Recall, the community left it to ZFND in ZIP1014 to decide how major grants were handed out. ZFND decided to have an elected committee. Later it was decided they would be paid for 5 hours of work per week (out of ZFNDs funds, not the ZOMG funds). All of this was with the idea that we’d get a number of grant applications and ZOMG merely needed to approve them. ZFND would then handle grant admin. We can quibble if this was the perfect setup, but we will never know because the grants never came. There are simply not a large number of qualified groups submitting good grants. ZOMG had the wrong purpose.
Ok, so now what?
Well, we need figure out how to structure ZOMG for this new purpose. It seems obvious to me, someone needs to actively recruit projects to/for funding. It seems likely that this will need far more time than ZOMG members put in now. It’s probably a full time job (or half time).
Doing this seems orthogonal to questions now being debated about changing ZIP1014 or making ZOMG its own entity. Under the current rules, ZFND and ZOMG are totally capable of doing this. And indeed ZFND is actively recruiting more support ( I don’t speak for ZFND here, so I should not comment on exactly what they are recruiting for) . Similarly, under any new structure, you’d also need to do this too. The exact structure seems irrelevant.
I’m not sure how exactly this interacts with a number of proposals, but I will point out one thing. I said in another thread about just paying ZOMG members more:
It seems, at best, that the various proposals for making structural changes to ZOMG are with the hope it makes them more agile so they can respond by, e.g., hiring people. That’s a fine proposal if those changes don’t actually slow down responding or distract people. But it’s a change in service of recognizing the changed purpose of ZOMG.