Zcash Media 2023

[noamchom]

Thats taking good-faith critique way over the line, come on. The Zcash Media deliverables for the first round were great quality, but its the timeline, cost, and their long term impact that are questionable.

With the second grant far underway, and zero engagement thus far, its completely within the community’s responsibility to start waving red flags.

I quoted many of the community members above who had gone head over heels with full faith once again… but now we are deep into the second grant, and haven’t got anything to show for it yet.

In the crypto sector, timing is of the essence. It will be a true injustice if this second round of Zcash Media deliverables once again are delivered long after the attention to altcoins has passed. Recall that the first grant videos didn’t release until 6-9 months after the broader crypto market hype cycle was already over. How in the hell could any of us have expected them to raise Zcash awareness, when they came 6 months after everyone had rushed for the Exits?!

Delivery of the second grant’s videos has got to be timely, and they’ve got to be adequately boosted in advance by the Zcash Media team and the broader Zcash ecosystem.

Calling people grifters is counter productive.

[pkr]

@noamchom

Thats taking good-faith critique way over the line, come on. The Zcash Media deliverables for the first round were great quality, but its the timeline, cost, and their long term impact that are questionable

Uh, so why weren’t they promoted if they were so good? You better believe if I made something that I thought was good, I would shill it to the high heavens.

Fool me once…

@noamchom

Recall that the first grant videos didn’t release until 6-9 months after the broader crypto market hype cycle was already over.

Ok, so how am I wrong again?

@noamchom

Calling people grifters is counter productive

Dude there is record silence on all the zcash media social accounts. It’s 100% not counter productive. They need to be called out publicly for the lack of deliverance.

If anything they should do an exposé on all the ECC x ZFND Drama. Turn it into the Real World for crypto.

Edit: looks like the powers that be are quick to moderate these 3rd party forums but not actually do any meaningful work on the product. Such a joke

[joris]

Could the community stop flagging stuff from the community ? This is infuriating, pkr was a candidate for ZCG. btw.

[pkr]

Thanks @joris. It should have been aimed more at Zcash media and the committee who approved it, and less specifically at @David_Heisenberg.

[zancas]

I share your concern I am eager to hear from the the Zcash Media team. I think now would be a great time for new Zcash content to appear!

[David_Heisenberg]

Hi all,

Understandably, I’ve been seeing people curious about our timeline. First off, I want to apologize for posting less updates than we’d like. Our number one priority has been making the content and everyone has been heads down on that. Our timeline has gotten stretched because the videos we chose to do are ambitious and have required a lot of research and writing time. We are still in the middle of creating the deliverables for our first milestone, and we are making good progress. I’ll be able to give a much more concrete update on future plans, including when to expect the videos to be published, once we are finished making them. We are targeting the end of November for finalizing the content.

Although we are taking longer than we would have liked, I think it may be helpful to know that our budget for this first phase has not changed. We are still working off of the startup funding we received in March (⅓ of the total budget), with the other ⅔ of the budget reserved by the ZF until we hit our Milestone 1 and 2 deliverables.

We’ve also been investing our own time and resources into the content because we really want it to succeed in reaching as wide an audience as possible. We believe there are many untapped future fans of Zcash and the privacy community’s mission and values, but it requires a content strategy that can meet them where they are at and explain complicated concepts in relatable and engaging ways. This has been our goal from the beginning - building a base of supporters from the ground up through understandable and motivating storytelling.

Thank you for your continued support and patience. Our team is working around the clock to make content the community can be proud of, and I’ll give more updates ASAP.

David

[AidenZ]

Will we see an update in 2023?

[David_Heisenberg]

Hi all,

We met with ZCG last Thursday to update them on our project. We want to provide the same update to you all too.

We currently estimate we will complete Milestone 1 in January. For Milestone 1, we have the following deliverables: 6 full-length videos and 18 60-second shorts. The 6 full-length videos have the following temporary titles.

1. The Three Dilemmas We Have to Overcome for Privacy Progress
2. The World is Going Cashless. It’s a Problem.
3. The Real Problem with the Web (and who’s trying to fix it). [Web 3 and 3.0 explainer.]
4. There’s a Hole in the Constitution
5. Privacy Regulation Theory | A solution to our overwhelming digital world
6. The Internet is Experimenting on You. Is it ethical?

The 18 shorts have a variety of topics mostly relating to things that couldn’t fit in the 6 full-length videos.

I don’t want to give away too much more of the story of each video, although I can say they all explore different aspects of privacy, whether it’s the legal history, the state of digital privacy, the psychology of privacy, etc. We showed the first part of video 1 to ZCG at our meeting and got positive reviews - so I think we went in the right direction. We’ve filmed all the videos and are in the editing stage. So while there’s still a lot to do, the end is in sight!

We also relayed to ZCG why we think this phase of our project has taken longer than we estimated. (Instead of taking 6 months and finishing in September, it will take ~10 months and finish in January.) I think the three main areas that slowed us down were:

1. Cold Start. To make the types of educational videos we wanted, about the big picture problems we think audiences will be interested in, required a lot of research. While we knew a lot about Zcash and its story from our first videos, expanding into different privacy issues required a lot of time. Then, turning that information into understandable videos took a lot of time. We hope that the next round of videos will take less time because we have already done a lot of research that we can use to write the next videos.

2. Format. We had a lot of discussions around the video format. Our first two videos we collected interviews and stitched them together to make the stories. But we knew we would have a lot more flexibility if we switched to a hosted format. However, discussing and ultimately changing the format took some time. Plus it took time to practice hosting (performing). However, now we have a really great setup for recording that we think looks good and is easy to repeat and iterate on. That will hopefully add up to extra time savings in the future.

3. Comprehensiveness. We had a strong tendency to make the “ultimate video” for each topic we chose. The one video you’d need to understand pretty much everything about a given topic. However, most of these topics are just too big to do that, especially if you are trying to make many of them at once. We found ourselves writing 20-30 min. long videos that would take too long to produce and eat up all our resources. We eventually learned the hard way how to limit ourselves and get in and out of a story. We now know much better now the length of video we can make. This should also help us be more efficient in the future.

Ultimately, while things took longer than desired, I think we spent a lot of time wrestling with the right questions, and I think by taking that time, we steered ourselves towards the right answers. So while we’ll never stop learning, we tucked a lot of valuable lessons under our belt during this process.

Right now, we are focused on finishing our Milestone 1 deliverables. We’ve tabled discussions about distribution until after these deliverables are delivered and we kick off phase two. We’ll circle back to the discussion of distribution in the New Year.

While having to “hurry up and wait” is never fun to hear - I can assure you it’s not our favorite thing either. Everyone on our team are “Zcashers”. We want these videos to be released ASAP, and if we could have finished and released them sooner, we would have. We want privacy, and Zcash’s importance to the privacy mission, to be more widely understood and valued. That’s always been our motivation. But we also have to balance our desire to get the message out ASAP with our responsibility to ensure we deliver the best videos we can. And that just takes time, no matter how efficient one is.

Finally, we’re grateful for the investment the community made in this work, even though doing so during a bear market was not easy. We don’t take the privilege we’ve been given to use our skills and our minds on something as meaningful as this for granted. And we’ve been working hard, almost every day during the past year, to make sure the seeds of the community’s investment bear fruit.

[dismad]

Super excited to watch these!! Thanks for the update 2024 going to be

[noamchom]

@noamchom

I am deeply troubled by this Zcash Media grant, which is such a grand cost but is yielding quiet literally no social media engagement for Zcash in its first +7 months.

Some of us in the community were highly skeptical about recontinuing an even more expensive grant, with a team that did an average job with their first $1,000,000 grant.

We’re now at the end of 2023, and not even a tweet or a 30 second teaser video has been created.

Thanks for the updates David, and Happy Holidays, we’re all rooting for your team to get the job done next year!

[AidenZ]

Can I see the video in January?

[zerodartz]

7 days to go?
will it happen - kinda excited for the first one.

[zerodartz]

I read it again. so no schedule yet wen we will see first video, even when all 6 videos will be finished for delivery?

imo next time it would be better to make each video a milestone instead of making so many videos at once.

[noamchom]

Zcash Media 2023

Hey folks, After spending the last 5 months meeting with many different Zcash stakeholders and lots of internal planning, we are excited to present our plan for Zcash Media for 2023! We’ve consolidated our plan and frequently asked questions into a presentation and FAQ. Also, here is the link to our proposal on the Zcash Grants platform: Gallery View: Zcash Community Grants Program. We look forward to continue developing Zcash Media into a powerful tool for Zcash education and adoption. …

Zcash Media 2023

Perhaps you forget what happened with the first Zcash Media grant. They delivered ~10 months later than originally proposed, and to keep their work going they required additional tack-on proposals. Did they ultimately get the job completed up to par? Yes, but it was to the context of a significant schedule slip and required an extra $200,000 or so. The videos and content did okay but were by no common use of the word “game changing”. The community paid about $700,000 for 3 videos and a new …

@ambimorph

Think to yourself how you would approach such news after being unresponsive and underperformant. Would you be embarrassed? Would you be apologetic and own up to your mistakes? Would you privately contact ZCG members and explain your circumstances, or would you publicly call them incompetent and ask for sympathy for the employers that you didn’t look out for?

Fair enough, I agree with you now given more info. For the ZM grant, as with all ZCG grants, we’re putting trust in the private communications between ZCG and the ZM team.

Based on the 2023 Zcash Media thread, publicly I can see that

1. they are under performing the original schedule by a lot
2. public communication has been sparse
3. no deliverables have been created yet
4. we’re holding our breathe, waiting for the next tack-on grant request

Does the ZCG have any documented methodologies for measuring grantee performance/ professionalism/ communications/ et all? It feels like a discretionary/ gut-feelings process currently.

This is a perfect case for user-defined comment merge. This belongs in the other thread

[David_Heisenberg]

Hi all,

We wanted to provide an update on where we’re at! I’ll keep this update short as I’ve already elaborated on the overarching reasons for the delay and how we plan to be more efficient for Milestone 2. The only new bit of information I can add is that we didn’t hit our goal of finishing the current videos by the end of this month because we had some other projects flare up, requiring the attention of our team members. To compensate, we brought on two additional team members to get us to the finish line.

Here’s a per-episode update:

1. Episode: Dilemmas. Status: Ready to submit.
2. Episode: Cashless. Status: Requires further editing and animation.
3. Episode: Web3. Status: Requires further editing and animation.
4. Episode: Constitution. Status: Requires one more editing day.
5. Episode: Privacy Regulation Theory. Status: In animation.
6. Episode: Internet Ethics. Status: Ready to submit.
7. Episode: Shorts Batch #1 (9 shorts). Status: Several ready to submit. Several require further editing and animation.
8. Episode: Shorts Batch #2 (9 shorts). Status: Requires further editing and animation.

We were going to wait to finish everything so we could submit it all in one go, but after discussion with @aquietinvestor, we think it’s best to submit batches of finished videos as they come. That way, the videos can start to speak for themselves instead of me! We will submit the first batch to ZCG/ZF at the end of next week (minimum three episodes). I’ll also provide another update here once we turn in the first batch that will include estimates for when any videos we didn’t submit will be finished. Although we’ve been in frequent communication with ZCG along the way for this project, I will try to also increase the frequency of updates on the forum as we get closer and closer to finishing Milestone 1.

In the meantime, as the current videos are being edited and animated, we’ve already started writing scripts for the next videos, researching and interviewing potential additional team members, and thinking about distribution. As we get past this first milestone, I’ll reach out to community members to see how we can best coordinate around releasing the videos.

[artkor]

@David_Heisenberg

We will submit the first batch to ZCG/ZF at the end of next week (minimum three episodes).

Does this mean they will be released to the public next week?

[David_Heisenberg]

Hi all,

We submitted 5 deliverables to ZCG/ZF yesterday!

Here’s where each episode stands:

1. Episode: Dilemmas. Status: Submitted.
2. Episode: Cashless. Status: Requires further editing and animation.
3. Episode: Web3. Status: Requires further editing and animation.
4. Episode: Constitution. Status: Submitted.
5. Episode: Privacy Regulation Theory. Status: Needs a few more days of editing and animation touch-ups.
6. Episode: Internet Ethics. Status: Submitted.
7. Episode: Shorts Batch #1 (9 shorts). Status: Submitted.
8. Episode: Shorts Batch #2 (9 shorts). Status: Submitted.

Our top priority right now is finishing the remaining 3 deliverables.

Regarding distribution, we’re not quite ready for that yet. We first want to finish the remaining deliverables to complete Milestone 1, discuss with ZCG any notes they have on the videos, strategize distribution with ZCG, and get ahead on creating the next set of videos. In general, our feeling right now is that it is best to be able steadily release the videos as part of a cohesive campaign spread out over a long-enough time period to sustain attention. Personally, I think our experience releasing our last videos supports this strategy. Last time, we tried to time the videos to sync with NU5, which created a rush to release everything. So ultimately, while I think it was exciting to have the videos come out so quickly (we got our first grant in August of '21 and released the videos in April '22 - less than 9 months!), we released them and had nothing left in the tank to sustain attention. Plus, the market took a downturn, taking the oxygen out of the room. This time, I hope we can build a library of enough content to be able to release things over a much longer time period, creating a much more reliable, systematic, and sustainable campaign. (It’s an added bonus if releases are aligned with a rising market.)

[cryptomuncher]

What I don’t understand (and hoping someone can explain) is if Milestone 1 is now 8 months later than expected and from the original grant delivery of it would trigger $300k with another $300k after the delivery of the next set of videos, why wouldn’t everyone involved take a pause, get the initial video set out, see how they perform and then reevaluate before committing another significant chunk of money?

Really seems like this grant was trying to do too much at once with no real method for feedback beyond the ZCG/ZF Media communication.

[zerodartz]

Id say - publish 1st episode very soon, then community is happy to see something and then there is more time to discuss the distribution and marketing etc further.

[Reformed_Zcash]

only a community of fools is gonna be happy to pay a million dollars for a dozen YouTube videos that generate 500k views. sorry to be sour about this one but cmon Zcash is hurting real bad but for some god unknown reason ZCG signed up for another round of this dog & pony show