As a member of Jason McGee’s ZIP 1024 Independent Review Committee, I guess I should express my position on this. To be clear, ECC has no dog in this fight other than wanting Zcash to be as successful as possible. Jason invited a couple of members of ECC to participate in the committee just to observe and to offer our opinions, so that’s what this is.
The amendment looks fine to me, and I’m grateful to Jason for organizing the process so well and to the other members of the review committee for hashing out the issues together. I personally would definitely not oppose this amendment (in any of the variations expressed so far on this thread).
I feel like the various ideas for how to establish a cap on ZOMG/MGRC’s annual budget for their own operations are all too complicated, and also that giving the Zcash Foundation’s Community Advisory Panel a choice of which cap to impose is an unnecessary complication. I’d suggest that the folks in this thread pick their favorite and present that to ZCAP for a yea or nay, and I’d suggest it be a simple one.
(And among the simple ones, I like wobbzzz’s suggestion to use ZEC instead of USD as the unit of measurement.)
The reason I say this is that I think rules and prescriptions are often an ineffective way to get what we want.
Going forward, the community should be scrutinizing how the ZOMG uses those funds and if they think it is a good use of funds, and should be giving the ZOMG guidance and — if necessary — corrective action, and that this will be true regardless of what the rules-based hard cap is.
Like, if the next ZOMG is spending 1000 ZEC per year on its own operations, the community should have visibility into that, and should be judging the value of that work. If ZOMG is spending that money on ineffective stuff or unnecessarily expensive stuff, the community should push back on that, but if it is spending it on highly valuable stuff that is getting great results, then the community should encourage the ZOMG to do more of that! And the community should do that regardless of whether the rules-based hard cap is 1000 ZEC or 10,000 ZEC or whatever.
So, the focus should probably be at least as much on the value of the output as on the cost of the input.
And here’s the thing — the Zcash Foundation itself cannot do that! At least not without disempowering the ZOMG and relegating them to being passive voters instead of being leaders of the decentralized Zcash community. The Zcash Foundation can enforce rules, such as a cap on the total expense, but it can’t monitor and guide the ZOMG’s actions, while still getting any decentralization benefit from ZOMG’s existence.
So anyway, I think the amendment looks fine and I hope it’ll be approved by the Zcash Foundation and it’ll yield a more empowered and effective ZOMG in the next cycle.
Finally, I want to say that imho the first ZOMG did a great job despite the red tape (which I largely attribute to the previous iteration of community-endorsed rules and prescriptions). It’s a testament to the depth of the Zcash community that we got five high-integrity people, at least some of whom put in a lot of work for no real reward and brought us home some good results. Thanks, y’all!