On March 13th, COZ released an official update to the developer community’s organizational and operational structure. These changes include a newly defined project focus, an update to the rewards system, and transition from a council to board members. The reorganization took form following a three-day summit held in December 2018 in Amsterdam, NL. The summit focused on the vision and direction for COZ in 2019 and beyond.

Before the summit, the longstanding developer group “asked the development community for feedback on topics such as onboarding, rewards, adoption, communication, and the overall direction of the community.”

From these conversations, three main areas of improvement were identified:

  1. Focusing resources on the products that provide the most value to the NEO ecosystem.
  2. Increasing leadership through the definition of roadmaps, task priorities, and overall vision.
  3. Increasing transparency in the rewards system and with a more straightforward process that is easier for new contributors to understand.

In Q1 of 2019, COZ began to incorporate these three changes through a series of re-organizational and operational changes.

Projects eligible for weekly rewards

To narrow the scope of projects eligible for weekly rewards, COZ identified eight projects that offer the “majority of the value realized by the ecosystem.” These projects include:

According to COZ polling, the projects relied upon most by the community are neon-wallet, neo-python/boa, neo-scan, and neon-js. CoZ board member, Dean Jeffs, said “these projects won by a landslide. It wasn’t even close.”

In addition to community members, COZ reached out to NEO Global Development (NGD) to gather their input on COZ projects of importance. NGD indicated they saw value in neo-go, neo-storm, and neo-debugger-tool, which COZ included in eligible projects for weekly rewards.

New roles: Project Leads and Technical Project Manager

Former project maintainers are now known as project leads. The two initial project leads are Max Lasky (@comountainclimber), and Erik van den Brink (@ixje), who are project leads for Neon Wallet and neo-python, respectively. Lasky and van den Brink are currently coordinating with COZ leadership to develop roadmaps and milestones for their projects.

In conjunction with defining roadmaps, project leads also “play a crucial role in the improved rewards process, which includes tagging issues with priority status and assessing contributions from other developers.”

In addition to the new project lead roles, COZ has identified Joe Stewart (@Hal0x2328) as its first technical project manager (TPM). Stewart was offered the position due to his “aptitude for innovation and problem-solving.”

Further, he has achieved many accomplishments within the NEO ecosystem. COZ states, “among his achievements, Joe was the winner of the first-ever COZ dApp comp with NEO Smart IoT. He is also the creator of the MCT token, the lead developer of HashPuppies, and has authored a NEO Enhancement Proposal for an NFT standard.”

Stewart’s role as TPM includes overseeing all of COZ’s projects. For projects with a lead, Stewart is to assist in the development of roadmaps and overall progress. For projects without a lead, the TPM is “currently speaking with past maintainers and contributors to put high-level roadmaps in place and is also responsible for defining issue priority.”

The TPM will also review project contributions and offer feedback with regards to reward distribution.

New rewards model

The new COZ rewards model is “loosely based around the Ethereum Bounty Program,” to improve the effectiveness and transparency of rewards. The reward amount is calculated in accordance with a tasks impact and quality.

Eligible projects for rewards include an impact label, which “correlates to both the importance of the task to the project as well as eligible awards for task completion.” The impact labels aim to differentiate between high and low priority items.

COZ leadership believes the labels assist developers in “[picking] up issues that best suit their skills and availability while still driving projects in the right direction.”

The reward distribution transaction ID’s will be posted in the GitHub issue or pull requests to increase transparency.

COZ transition from Council to Board

The leadership model of the developer community transitioned from that of a Council to a Board. The Board’s membership composition is a smaller, but more active group “who serve on the Board do so because they want to see COZ flourish as a community.”

The Board’s purpose is to “guide the direction of the community, provide support to its members, manage funding distribution, and act as the primary liaisons with NGD.”

The 2019 COZ Board positions are unpaid, and members include:

  • Tyler Adams
  • Fabio Canesin
  • Ethan Fast
  • Tom Saunders
  • Chris Hager
  • Jaime Kindelan
  • Dean Jeffs

Looking forward, COZ aims to develop “clear guidelines for voting Board members in and out,” which are to be announced as they are defined.

Find the full article at the link below:
https://medium.com/proof-of-working/coz-organizational-update-new-roles-new-focus-and-streamlined-rewards-system-9b69c7280486

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