ZIP 1014-1: Proposed Amendment to the “MG Slice (Major Grants)” Section

As an outsider, to me this looks like yet more heavy-handedness with little respect for the principles of decentralization. The future does not look bright. Somebody, fix this.

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I believe this responsibility falls on everyone’s shoulders. We will have better framework and zip amendment process.

This is not necessarily true. Complex options with unclear decision-making process can result in decisions no one wants.

Are we expecting this to still be true in the future? Will ZCAP be an exclusive club or a more democratic representatives* of Zcash community?

*including merchants, institutions, academics, and regular folks who uses and loves Zcash.

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Here’s the thing, that poll isn’t complex at all. I find it fairly insulting actually, to the ZCAP, to call it a complex poll. It’s only complex relative to the other two options. The questions are straightforward and easy to answer. Through answering those questions, all the questions in the other poll options are also accommodated.

I also really want to emphasize that opinions in here are 100% my own. So any questions directed at ZF, I will refrain from answering as I’d like to limit my contribution in here to that of a community member who simply cares for the future of Zcash and financial privacy.

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Just reversing the logic in one of your bullet points, I think it’s as persuasive as the original statement (quote below):

The “Simple” option only received 25% of votes. Jason’s “ZEC with Optional Cap option” received 40% of the votes, and the “Complex” option received 35% of votes. So, 75% of respondents prefer a method of questioning more complex than the “Simple” option. Therefore, presenting the “Simple” option to ZCAP is not supported by the results of the poll

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For my opinion on this, it’s difficult to interpret the results of a poll with 40 responses and 3 questions. The results were:

  • Simple: 25% (10 votes)
  • Jason: 40% (16 votes)
  • Complex: 35% (14 votes)

It was very close, and I prefer the approach to err on the side of caution and present some more questions to the ZCAP to get their sentiment, more data is good right?

I think Dodger did mention something like this in advance, saying if there was no clear majority we may go for another close option if it made sense, and I think this does make sense (to me). I’m not sure if that was a post or on one of the recent streams.

Also I’d like to add that naming one of the options “Jason’s…” was unfortunate as it could have led to the impression that it was Jason’s preferred option and we could have had people selecting that option due more to wanting to support Jason. I know Jason made it clear in places that this wasn’t his preference but not everyone would have known that.

I get that this has been a drawn out process and I appreciate the effort everyone has put in, this will improve the Zcash governance processes going forward.

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Where? I don’t see that in this thread, and I don’t believe there are any other threads. I don’t recall him saying that, but, sure, there’s always a chance that I missed something.

At the end of the day, I want ZCAP to be polled and I want the amendment approved because I genuinely believe this will help make ZOMG more effective. The exact method of questioning doesn’t matter; I generally just prefer more streamlined methods.

The more important issue is that in the “Complex” option the first question doesn’t mention “amending ZIP 1014.” I think that should be explicitly stated to ZCAP and hope @Dodger will change the question from:

Should ZOMG have a discretionary budget?

To:

Do you support amending ZIP 1014 to give ZOMG a discretionary budget?

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Yes I can’t see any reason not to phrase it the way you have suggested and I hope it is amended as such.

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Why are we debating which survey to send? Can’t we just send all 3?

Most surveys I participate in at my day job ask the same question about 3 times anyways all worded slightly differently to cater for different interpretations. If we end up with conflicting results we can debate which word(s) made the difference then.

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First off, I want to express my appreciation to @aquietinvestor here for his hard work and persistence in moving forward with the proposed changes to ZIP 1014-1.

But I’m pretty concerned about how this has all played out, and I’m alarmed at the message that @Dodger is sending to the community by effectively overriding the results of the community poll.

For what its worth, I happen to agree with @Dodger and @anon35140610 that the more complex option is a better choice to send to ZCAP - gives more flexibility and discretion in the hands of ZCAP, who are (I hope) an intelligent and well intentioned group of people capable of weighing the full array of options and making reasoned choices.

I understand that this isn’t a democracy per se, but it strikes me as deeply unfair to effectively toss out the poll results after the desired/optimal result wasn’t obtained based on ex-post facto reasoning about “lacking a clear majority”. We had a slim, but nevertheless clear plurality in favor of a somewhat simplified array of choice. I’ve never heard of any functional system that defaults to the preferences of some other entity barring the selection of some kind of catastrophically bad or destructive outcome. And to be clear, while I believe that the simplified option is sub-optimal, it was what was selected by the terms of the poll, and it is a reasonable choice that reasonable people can disagree on. Yes, you can make the case that the implied preference of the poll is towards more complexity rather than less, but the poll was not designed to capture that and as such I don’t think that this necessarily is in fact what most voters intended to convey. For all we know, the second choice of people who voted for Jason’s modified version may have preferred the simple option over the most complex.

I just want to point out as someone who thinks highly of and favorably towards the motivations of everyone involved here, that this is not at all a good look. I think if polls like this are going to be constructed with the input/blessing of ZF, the results should be respected, even if they are not exactly what we want and are chosen by plurality rather than clear majority. If the majority of governance decisions were held to the standard of “decisive majority” very little would ever actually get done.

Ranked choice voted could potentially solve this problem. Not sure how practical that is going forward or what discussions there have been on this in the past.

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Thanks to everyone for their supportive comments.

At this point, the results of the poll and the method of questioning appear to have become somewhat polarizing, and (maybe it’s an irrational fear, but) I don’t want to be in a situation where Jason’s “ZEC with Optional Cap option” is used and people who would otherwise support the amendment vote to reject the amendment because they were unhappy with the questions ZCAP was presented with.

So let’s move forward with the “Complex” option. My only comment is that the first question should be changed to read:

Do you support amending ZIP 1014 to give ZOMG a discretionary budget?

In the future, we should all do our part to explicitly state any non-standard terms of a poll from the outset so there’s no disagreement regarding how to interpret the results.

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The poll has been opened, and I think we’ve done a good job of incorporating the feedback we’ve received from the community, including the feedback provided here on this topic.

@aquietinvestor: I want to thank you for putting in the effort to bring this proposal to the point where it could be presented to ZCAP for approval. Over the past year, plenty of people have expressed strong opinions about ZOMG, ZF and ZIP 1014, and offered advice about how ZIP 1014 should be changed. You’re the first person to actually put the effort into drafting a clearly-articulated proposal, and incorporating feedback from the community to refine and improve it. So genuine kudos to you for doing that. :clap:

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The results are in and the overwhelming majority of ZCAP voters support amending ZIP 1014 to provide ZOMG a discretionary budget.

Do you support amending ZIP 1014 to provide the ZOMG Committee with a discretionary budget?

Yes 78
No 8
Abstain 10

Based on the results, it looks like the budget will be denominated in ZEC. I’ll wait for @Dodger to interpret the remaining details of the budget, cap, and floor as I don’t want to risk misinterpreting them.

Thank you to everyone who supported this initiative. This is a big win for ZOMG and the Zcash Community.

Happy New Year!

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The poll is closed and the results are in!

The ZCAP voted overwhelmingly in favour of amending ZIP 1014 to provide the ZOMG Committee with a discretionary budget.

Congratulations to @aquietinvestor on successfully proposing the first amendment to ZIP 1014! ZF will seek advice on the final wording of the amendment before formally adopting it.

ZCAP recommended that the budget denominated in ZEC rather than USD, with both a floor and a cap.

Using the “majority approval” approach previously described, and using the number of votes cast (96) as the denominator, the ZCAP recommends a budget of 3% of the ZOMG slice of the Dev Fund (approximately 3,156 ZEC), with a floor of $250,000 and a cap of $1,000,000.

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This is great news all round! Thank you for conducting a smooth election and voting round.

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Congrats @aquietinvestor!!

How it started:

How it’s going:
https://vote.heliosvoting.org/helios/elections/2d0787fc-61de-11ec-8619-8ee85a8a1b8a/view

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While I have no strong opinion on this, I would like to add my personal interpretation of the results. This is all based on a simple majority preference (vs option with most votes but not a majority preference):

  • For Q5, those who vote for a low budget would prefer a lower budget among other options. Meanwhile, those who vote for a high cap would prefer a higher budget among other options. For example, if I vote for 1% budget it means I would prefer 3% budget compared to 10% budget. The majority of voters prefer 3% budget (30 for 1% + 21 for 3%) compared to 1%. 51 v 30
  • Q6 is a clear Yes/No question. 42 Y v 35 N
  • For Q7, majority of voters prefer $100,000 floor. 35 v 28
  • Q8 is a clear Yes/No question. 42 Y v 40 N
  • For Q9, similar to Q5, those who vote for a low cap would prefer a lower option, and vice versa. For example, if I vote for $1,000,000 cap it means I would prefer $500,000 compared to $100,000. As such, the majority of voters prefer $500,000 cap as 35 voters (14 for 100k + 9 for 250k + 12 for 500k) compared to $1,000,000. 35 v 24

So, the majority voice in this poll is:

ZCAP recommends a budget of 3% of the ZOMG slice of the Dev Fund (approximately 3,156 ZEC), with a floor of $100,000 and a cap of $500,000.

Notes: I disregard all abstain votes in counting the majority preference. I also understand I have no say in how ZF decides to interpret the poll.

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(Speaking for myself, not ECC)

I interpreted the “Abstain” option as “I am not voting on this question”, rather than “I am voting to be okay with any option”. The latter interpretation could be equivalently expressed by voting on the largest option, but only the former interpretation enables avoidance of conflicts of interest (which is what I interpreted the “Abstain” option to be enabling). As such, I also personally think that the “Abstain” votes should not be counted within the denominator of each question (and that the meaning of “Abstain” should be made explicitly clear for future polls; in particular, it was not mentioned in the ZF blog post where majority approval was described).

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Thanks for your comment @str4d. Based on what you say above, how would the results for the questions related to the cap be interpreted where the number of “abstain” votes is inconsistent between the two questions? “Should there be a cap?” only had 14 “abstain” votes and “What should the cap be?” had 37 “abstain” votes.

A way around this in the future would be to consolidate the two related questions to ask:

Question: Should there be a cap? If so, what should it be?

  1. $100,000
  2. $250,000
  3. $500,000
  4. $1,000,000
  5. No cap
  6. Abstain

I 100% agree with this. We don’t want to be in a situation where ZF needs to hold another ZCAP poll to determine how to interpret the results of a ZCAP poll. :slight_smile:

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The fact that in every case (including question 2) there are no fewer abstentions for a sliding-scale question than there are for its gating yes-no question, indicates that at least some people interpreted “Abstain” as “I am not voting on this question”.

The fact that there are more abstentions for the precise numeric cap than there are for the presence of a cap at all, implies one or both of:

  • Some people felt it was okay to vote on the existence of a cap, but that it would be a conflict of interest to vote on the precise amount.
  • Some people interpreted “abstain” to mean “I am voting to be okay with any option”.

We unfortunately can’t distinguish these two cases, which means that anyone who voted “abstain” under the belief that it was equivalent to voting for the highest option, would have their vote effectively discarded if abstentions were discarded from question 9. However, not discarding abstentions means that anyone who voted “abstain” in order to declare a conflict of interest, is having their conflict of interest discarded (either because their conflict means they otherwise might have voted for a lower cap, or because their conflict means they would have voted for a maximal cap and their conflict-of-interest is effectively being ignored). I personally feel the latter is more important to avoid, hence my feeling that “Abstain” votes should not be counted.

However, we can be confident in not counting abstentions for the boolean existence-of-cap question, because it does not affect the outcome of those questions. There is no “sort order” to the boolean questions, and there are only two non-abstention options, so “I vote for what the majority decides” (including them in the denominator) is equivalent to “I am not voting on this question” (excluding them). In the case of question 8, it’s \frac{42}{96} > \frac{40}{96} vs \frac{42}{82} > \frac{40}{82}; same outcome either way.

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(Speaking for myself as a ZCAP voter, not the Foundation.)

I had also interpreted the results differently to @Dodger.

But I’m not too concerned about the difference, because we can change the floor and cap at the next ZOMG election in a year’s time. And the new ZOMG know there was some ambiguity in the vote, so they can act accordingly.

I suggest that future ZCAP polls do not use “Abstain” as an option, because it is ambiguous for some questions. Instead, we should name options based on what they do.

So for all the questions (other than the ZOMG election) there would be:

  • No Answer (let other voters decide)

There would also be an extra option for the floor:

  • $0 (no floor)

And an extra option for the cap:

  • Full ZEC Value (no cap)

I also quite liked the Re-Open Nominations option for the Foundation Board. I’d like to see that in all our elections, so that the Foundation isn’t deciding if there are enough candidates before the poll even starts.

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