Support for Community Web resources

[mineZcash]

Proposal for Foundation support of Zcash Community.com resource infrastructure.

With the October launch of Zcash the development team has made great strides in improving the Zcash protocol and the Zcash promise of true financial privacy has attracted thousands of new Zcash users. There has been a significant increase in traffic to three key areas.

The Zcash community website visitors The Zcash community rocket chat users

Initially when the community was smaller it was not a big deal to host these resources as a way of giving back and helping contribute to the success of Zcash and what it stands for. This exponential growth of the use resources has necessitated more robust servers, hosting and bandwidth.

My out-of-pocket expenses and traffic can be seen in this chart: Here The out-of-pocket expenses do not reflect "person months of effort" as requested by the call for proposals.

As Zcash continues to grow and the Zcash Company continues to focus on the core needs of the Zcash software and protocol it is my hope that the Foundation would be able to help offset some of the basic expenses so that they do not eventually balloon beyond what is feasible.

(This issue was originally opened on the Foundation GitHub with radix42s proving keys hosting information. I have removed mention of his expenses so that he may submit his own Grant submission.)

PLEASE NOTE: Since I am a member of the Zcash Foundation Grant Review committee I hereby recuse myself from any opinion regarding the merits of this issue.

[tromer]

I suggest that grant proposals for ongoing infrastructure expenses be budgeted for these durations:

• 12 months for already-established/low-risk services
• 6 months for experimental services of uncertain success (with the understanding that additional funding is likely in case of success)

[amiller]

It looks like 12 months * ~$200 = $2400 is the amount requested for 1 year of the service. It would make sense to include some notion of human attention/work time too.

[zmanian]

@mineZcash Is there a particular reason you don't generate revenue from these resources with advertising? Given your traffic numbers, I would think a number of cryptocurrency businesses would be interested.

[tromer]

My opinion is that even if monetization via ads is possible, it comes at the expense of functionality and privacy; so it would be reasonable for the Foundation to support an important community service in order to keep it ad-free. @mineZcash, can you clarify your ad policy in case the proposal is funded? Also, I agree that reasonable human-labor costs can be included in the budget.

[mineZcash]

@tromer @zmanian I did run ADs on my first site and decided to move away from them on the community site. I have never really liked ADs and other types of monitization methods because it could be perceived as a bias for a particular service when I have tried to make the site as factual and neutral as possible. As I mentioned in several posts: https://www.zcashcommunity.com/2016/05/16/why-we-need-zcash/ https://www.zcashcommunity.com/2017/01/28/welcome-to-the-community/ the community around Zcash and the promise of Zcash empowering individuals with a choice for privacy is more important to me than trying to make a profit.

On the other hand, I also feel that there are a number of good Grant submissions that could be funded with the funds I have requested if I were to remove my issue from consideration. So if the funds are to be allocated for another Grant I understand that as well.

Since this question of ADs has been brought up I contacted Zcash Company (@ioptio and zooko) for an opinion on this as well, I understand that the main Zcash website links to several of the pages and the community chat I don't want to change the site in a way that would be perceived as negative.

As to Tromers question of policy going forward: if this proposal were to be funded I would continue the policy of no advertising whatsoever and strive to remain neutral in all information provided on the site.

[acityinohio]

Every informal proposal has multiple reviews by the review committee. The reviews are being collected and discussed in a private google doc (the 5 reviewers all have edit access to it, no one else can view it). By way of early, informal feedback, the reviewers have made a list of projects that they consider leading candidates for grant funding.

In that vein, your project was selected as one of the leading candidates, and the review committee encourages you to submit a full proposal by October 6th and looks forward to reviewing it.

[mineZcash]

Sorry for that last minute submission: I have been very busy with my day-job lately :) Zcashcommunity Foundation Grant Q42017.pdf

[mineZcash]

I am pleased to announce that I have received an anonymous donation which covers this issue!

It has been awhile since I checked my private accounts (I really should more often) and it turns out someone sent funds late September. This is enough to cover exactly what I requested. Thank you to whomever sent the Donation!!

I hereby withdraw this issue, the funds can be better spent on some of the other worthy Grant Proposals. :)