Based on @tromp’s request I herewith volunteer myself as a candidate for the new “Grin Community Council”.
I’m Hendrik from Germany, known as hendi online and in this community.
I’ve been a member of the grin community since 2017. I’ve built and run the first open-source Grin Explorer and also built and ran one of the few pools that launched on Grin’s Genesis day (this was grin-pool.org which I’ve closed down after it was apparent that miners wanted to mainly join on large pools). The pool was a 0% fee pool, with optional donations to the Grin development fund (we’ve sent the first non-test Grin donation according to igno).
I’ve been a fan of Grin’s vision from the start and supported the project in many ways, and want to continue though. Grin is in a unique position with its fair, non-ICO no-premine launch, a highly competent dev team (Rust and C++) and a great community that share the values of this coin. Besides Bitcoin, Grin is the only crypto currency community in which I am involved.
I’ve put far less sweat, blood and tears into grin than many other people, especially the grin/rust and grin++ people. Nevertheless I’ve put a lot of time, money (both private donations and via my company) into the project and see myself as a part of the community. I haven’t asked for any compensation for working on my projects (full disclosure: the pool received some donations, which I’ve donated to the grin fund) and worked on them at my own time and expanses, but I understand that everybody’s situation is different and that more complex projects can require funding to get up to speed.
I’m in favor of the simple Split Fund Proposal to make this process as discoverable, easy, and viable as possible.
In my opinion – or rather the experience of long talks with people from the community and the dev team – the donations that the grin project received were in large parts not meant specifically for the rust implementation, but to advance the “grin blockchain” and “mimblewimble” as a whole. In other words, it should be absolutely no question whether grin++ should receive some of these funds. Their work on usability is the reason that almost half of all grin nodes run on their software, and DavidT’s work on the mobile/Android version is outstanding as well. But not only Grin++ is amazing, so are many other community projects, Ironbelly, Niffler, to name just a few.
Long story short, the community shows continuously that they’re willing to and able to do great things to advance Grin, its blockchain and its ecosystem. While theoretically it has been possible to receive grants from the core council’s fund, in practice this hasn’t been used effectively / as often as it should’ve happened.
I see the community fund as a great way to state we care about the community, acknowledge their capabilities and want to support them supporting grin.
If I’m chosen to be one of the fund managers / key holders, I pledge to adhere to the spending guidelines, be responsible with spending (but not too frugal!) and support community projects as needed. I envision this fund to not be solely for Grin++ (desktop & mobile) development, but they’re definitely part of the intended recipients. Ideally, the new fund should support both existing project but especially invite new projects to start.
I promise to act reasonably and non-hostile on funding requests, and offer open ears and helping hands with drafting requests to lower the (exiting or at least felt) barrier to enter. No one should refrain from asking for money for fear of doing something wrong, getting called-out, or simply being rejected.
tl;dr: Which approach do I support?
I would support all of them (all tackle at least one issue with the current state, and have a good chance of improving things tremendously), but my preference is as follows:
