Does Zcash have anywhere where independent researchers outside of the ECC and Zcash Foundation can come together and post their research related to Zcash?
The Ethereum community has ethresear.ch, the Monero community has a the MRL IRC chat and a dedicated github, and the Bitcoin community used to bitcointalk.org (it’s a bit more spread out now, the best contender is the bitcoin-dev mailing list).
I think either adding an extra category/section or a dedicated discourse forum for Zcash related research can definitely help cultivate this community more and foster cross-collaborations.
There has been a #zcash-wizards and #zcash-apprentices channel on the rocket chat, low density so far and it’s not as good for detailed technical conversation as the forum or discord style site. Agree at least a spot like that on this forum could be good. Best approach IMO is just to start conversations in a general topic here, and once there’s enough of a pattern, mods can herd them into a focused subforum. There’s lots of good discussions on the GitHub issues to draw from too
They have a lot of projects that they would like to tackle. I think it would be a great idea to put out grants to work on these and build a community of researchers for Zcash outside of the ECC. This would lessen their load quite a bit.
After looking at that board, I’m more convinced that a separate forum for research would be very valuable and it would keep the discussion focused.