It’s an important question, and one we considered seriously as we were developing the proposal. And I should add: even though we’re one committee, our views on this topic are multiple. I’ll reply with my thoughts, and the other committee members can chime in with theirs if they’d like.
Ideally, 100% of the tokenholders would be active members of the governance process. In that ideal world, people who contribute to Compound would ask tokenholders for a grant, and tokenholders —100% of whom are active members of governance process — would vote to approve or deny the grant request in a reasonable amount of time. While that would indeed be ideal, it’s unfortunately not practical today. Tokenholders are unlikely to have the time to review and approve dozens of small grants, and even if they did find the time, the process would certainly operate far more slowly than the speed of a nimble committee. And speed, I believe, is a critical ingredient for a successful grants program. The more quickly you move, the better the process is for grants applicants. A better process leads to more applicants, which leads to a more successful grants program.
In short, it’s not so much that we wanted to form a committee as a committee happened to be the least-bad option for piloting a small-scale grants program!