BD Travel and Speaker Bounty ( Discussion)

Governance
1

Hello everyone,

This discussion post aims to gauge the community’s sentiment about the proposed BD Travel and Speaker Bounty. We have also made a discussion post on Polkassembly

There isn’t a bounty focusing specifically on helping people travel to acquire leads (specifically business/enterprises and, in some cases, governments) and bring them into the Polkadot ecosystem. These costs can pile up quickly, and some deals take a long time to close. This means that most BD agents struggle to do their work consistently. Public speaking, moderating or joining high-level podcasts is another way of growing the Polkadot and creating traction. However, community members do not have a consolidated budget or funding channel to get their public speaking involvement paid.

Therefore, there should be a bounty that helps cover the costs of people traveling to events, acquiring leads at those events, and speaking about Polkadot (online and offline) to attract users and partners to Polkadot. The same applies for speakers, ensuring that their contributions are valued and that they can continue to represent Polkadot without financial strain.

We want to conduct a three-month proof of concept (POC). To be eligible to receive funds from the bounty, applicants must have a proven background in business development, public speaking, or starting startups ( founders). We plan to request $110,000 (DOT 30-day EMA) for this POC.

This bounty is planned to be launched with a ⅗ multisig. The following individuals will serve as Curators during this Proof of Concept phase of the BD Travel & Speaker Bounty, and we encourage any interested community members to apply for a Curator role. We want a bench of talent available if the bounty demands require additional Curators. More importantly, if the PoC proves successful, the initial Curators intend to step down 3-6 months after launch to enable other community members the opportunity to step into these roles. Some of the curators may choose to become advisors to the bounty.

We encourage anyone interested in becoming a curator in the future to reach out to us.

List of current curators ( more can be added in the future):

  • Mario Schraepen
  • James Slusser
  • Zoé Meckbach
  • Jashar Seyfi

The Secretary ( curator with specific tasks):

  • Christian Casini

Here is the doc with the full proposal: Polkadot BD Travel Bounty - Google Docs

We look forward to receiving feedback from the community!

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3

GM,
Thanks for the work in tackling this long-standing problem.

One of the first questions that came to my mind was whether we should establish requirements to be legible to get coverage from the bounty.

The set of actions you suggested is already a good step, but it could need more specification because I believe the approval of travel/funding will get very spicy and require lots of details.
Most likely, there has to be a framework to compare two travels and determine which one needs to be approved with a higher level of importance.

My first job was working in the expenses department, and I still remember the issue of what can be reimbursed, what a reasonable expense for countries X and Y is, and running after receipts.

With that in mind, I have a few thoughts:

  1. The bounty overhead appears inflated by the number of curators, with the secretary handling most of the workload.
  2. Certainly, the proposed curators are very skilled and potentially overqualified.
  3. Do you have an estimate of the hours the curators and secretary will need to review, decide, execute, and audit requests?

Potentially, it could make sense that the bounty expands toward speaker management for conferences/podcasts/etc. Then, the curators’ skills and ecosystem know-how and admin costs could give more value to finding the right speaker and deciding on the higher importance of certain conferences or leads.

I look forward to a healthy discussion!

4

Great to connect with you all! This has the potential to become a successful Bounty in the ecosystem. The curators are excellent speakers, and I have a few questions that I hope you can help clarify:

  • Who will be ineligible for this Bounty? (For instance, agents already paid for similar work; just a point to clarify if applicable).
  • The daily subsidy as well as other expenses may vary depending on the city of the event. The curator of the proposal should be committed to performing due diligence and knowing the average expenses in those cities. Have you already looked into how to do this?
  • Will webinars be included in this Bounty?
  • What regions will be able to participate? Considering that Polkadot has a very diverse and globally present community.

:eyes: Child Bounties can now be released the same day they’re granted.

Looking forward to your responses!

5

Hello everyone,

We recently connected with a member of the Events Bounty team, and we’re pleased to see that they are already working on many of the examples we listed in our proposal. It’s great to know we share the same vision for addressing key gaps in the ecosystem. Given their solid processes in place, we believe it makes more sense for them to take the lead on the use cases we described. We’re more than happy to support them as needed. For now, we will be closing this discussion-bounty.

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