While the funds are administered by the Zcash Foundation, applications for major grants are subject to approval by a five-seat Major Grant Review Committee. The first committee was elected last September, and adopted the name Zcash Open Major Grants or ZOMG.
Following the activation of Orchard last November, ZOMG began reviewing applications. To date, it has approved over $2.4m in grants, and has paid out $1,075,000 (the remaining $1.33m represents future milestone payments). As of block height 1,357,196, the Foundation holds 60,743 ZEC and $1,180,000 of funds earmarked for major grants, and the ZEC balance grows by 0.25 ZEC with every new block (an average daily increase of 288 ZEC).
Anyone can stand for election to the ZOMG Committee for a one-year term, and existing members may stand for re-election.
Schedule
We plan to follow a similar process and schedule to the one used last year to select the inaugural committee.
Between now and 11th December 2021 , new candidates should submit a forum post (ideally five paragraphs or less) in the governance zomg-elections category of the Zcash Community Forum, announcing their candidacy, and outlining their priorities and vision for ZOMG. Community members will have an opportunity to ask candidates questions directly as replies to their respective posts.
Candidates who had previously announced their candidacy must positively re-confirm that they are standing by posting to the this topic before 11th December. If they do not post reconfirmation of their candidacy by that date, we will assume that they are not standing . This is to ensure that there is no confusion or uncertainty regarding who is standing for election.
On December 15th ZF will host an open community video call, inviting all candidates to participate and giving community members an opportunity to ask them questions directly. Candidates aren’t required to attend, but we encourage them to do so. We will post a signup link for the call next week.
On December 20th ZF will open a Helios poll with the Zcash Community Advisory Panel to select five candidates to serve on the next ZOMG Committee.
Polling will close on December 31st .
As with last year’s poll, the poll will be decided by approval voting for five members out of the pool of candidates. The five candidates with the most votes (with a maximum of one ECC and one ZF representative, if selected) will become the new ZOMG Committee members.
Comment here and link to your thread in this primary thread so I can assign you to the ZOMG-candidate group and I will add a link to all threads in this top post in the order received.
All candidates will receive the title (ZOMG-Candidate) during the duration of the campaign so users can easily identify users that are running.
All: Please post any questions to candidates in thier individual threads to avoid everyone asking/answering questions in this thread.
With the deadline for announcing candidacy fast approaching, I think it’s best to announce that I won’t be running again.
I decided not to run again because I’m sure I won’t be able to dedicate the time and energy the role needs without weakening my work on my main project.
What brought me to Zcash was an interest in building a private and censorship-resistant online gathering space (Zbay), but in the course of pursuing that work I’ve learned that most of the hard things I need to focus on and learn about are adjacent to but pretty separate from Zcash (CRDTs ended up being a big deal, to give one example.) So while for much of the past year there was a lot of overlap between the learning and discussion I was part of on ZOMG and my own work on Zbay, there’s much less overlap now, and I’ve found a tension between spending time on ZOMG and spending time on Zbay that didn’t exist before when both roles depended on advancing Zcash functionality, privacy, developer experience, and usability as quickly as possible.
Being able to learn about and fund radically empowering privacy tech (working within a radically democratic / cyberpunk entity) is a dream job for me, so there’s part of me that is very reluctant to let go of it.
But being ready to dive in and understand the details of what I was funding was really important to doing a good job for ZOMG, for me anyway, and I know I won’t have the same amount of energy for that now that the questions I’m grappling with in my main role are elsewhere. So I think it’s best for voters to find someone else who will be able to do that!
I know at least one other current member (cburniske) has announced he’s not running again, so I hope the shrinking pool of incumbent candidates will spur anyone who is on the fence to run. It’s important that we have a larger and more diverse candidate pool than the last time around, and I worry that, with incumbents not running again, the default is that our candidate pool will be smaller. So if funding projects that make Zcash better would also be a dream job for you, I urge you to run!
Finally, I’m really proud of how well we did in the first year, and I hope as a cohort we can finish strong between now and November 18th. (ZOMG! We got a lot done!)
Thanks for the work you and other ZOMG committee members did Holmes!
One thing that I think would be helpful would be for departing members (cc @cburniske) to think about and encourage any person in their network they might know who could be a good ZOMG candidate. The experience of the Zcash ZOMG committee is vast and I think that committee members trying to find people who might want to carry the torch would be helpful to get a broad and diverse pool of candidates for each transition.
@Shawn I’m happy to hear you’re running again, Shawn. Curious, what made you decide to run again vs. the other incumbents who will not run for re-election? Also, how do you think ZOMG can be improved so that more of next year’s incumbents opt to run for another term?
ZOMG is under threat. I’m afraid that if this happens, the best option would be to freeze the fund until better times, leaving funding exclusively for approved projects. I would not like to see a significant relaxation in the criteria for selecting projects. The current team showed very balanced arguments and I believe that ZOMG coped with the task 100%.
To be clear, the community is looking for candidates with a certain set of qualifications, correct? Are the requirements posted somewhere? We’d be better off freezing the funds than just filling the seats.
