Dear Event Bounty Curators and @anamarie_com - I find your post here incredibly misleading and politically biased, hence I have to respond. You did state in your initial response (as well as in verbal feedback) that you rejected this because something similar was previously rejected in OpenGov. I believe this is circular logic, which would defeat the purpose of the bounty. The EB should be able to make its assessments independently of OpenGov and of political biases, but apparently this is not the case.

It is true that in your initial response you have also mentioned other reasons for rejecting it, but these have since been dispelled. Nonetheless you keep repeating them here. Let me address them one by one:

Vienna CEE Wealth Summit: The post-event report for this “proof-of-concept” conference has been submitted to the EB (although admittedly with a delay — apologies for that). The inclusion of Christoph, Tommi and Nathalie as speakers at this event should illustrate that we are striving for inclusive representation of the ecosystem, not just HIC.

This is an HIC event: This criticism would have been justified against Ref 731, but we have since made major adjustments. We have very clearly stated that we will involve other ecosystem agents (ambassadors, projects, and other ecosystem funds) in these events, but you keep ignoring that point. HIC here acts as the event's organiser, not the beneficiary. It is like saying WebZero benefitted more than Polkadot from organising Sub0 — clearly a ridiculous statement.

HIC is a profit driven entity, hence you should fund it yourself Yes, we are a profit driven entity, and we won’t apologise for that. So is literally any other company in the world. But we are also a Polkadot ecosystem fund, and every dollar raised at these investor conferences, will get reinvested into the Polkadot ecosystem. What exactly is bad about that?

You should scale it down: We just did! We scaled it down from 1m to 185k, and from 20+ events to 5 events. We just did the CEE Wealth Summit as a proof of concept, and it was a resounding success. To push us to reduce it even further to one event would be self-defeating, I don’t think 5 events (by a single organiser) are too much of a risk. We need some predictability to plan and execute these events.

This is a broad discretionary budget: The budget breakdown has been clearly stated in the table, as such it is not discretionary (again, this would have been a fair criticism of 731, but not of this proposal). It is true that the speaker selection has not been finalised yet, but it’s also a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, we can’t finalise the list of speakers before we know whether the budget gets approved. I also strongly disagree with your statement that “speaker selection should fall under the EB’s oversight”. I don’t think that the bounty curators should have a monopoly on deciding who gets to speak on behalf of Polkadot.

We are unsure about Riyadh as one of the locations: This is a particularly strange argument in my opinion. Riyadh is a major financial hub for capital allocators, and the Saudis have been actively investing in Web3. Animoca Brands just raise 50m there, as one of many examples. It is not the easiest market to penetrate, but with this particular conference we have a good opportunity. We also already have two Saudi investors in Fund I, and we want to scale that. To ignore Saudi Arabia when raising capital for Polkadot, would be a rather obvious mistake.

In summary, I am disappointed by the EB’s rejection of the proposal – the reasons provided are weak, outdated or outright false. This is why we’re now back to OpenGov.

Watch coverage of this proposal by The Kus:
https://x.com/thekusamarian/status/1866543406668730603?s=46&t=94A-XBM_WS_KnI_Ow6yBAw