EasyA x Polkadot University Microgrants Bounty

Do we have an idea of how long will this 1M USD be used? One of the issues with bounties of large sizes is that expenditure was either too small or extremely large and required constant refills. A budgeting requirement is required for bounties so we don't have uncertainty regarding its refills and we can approve a more or less known amount that's to be spent and project expenses safely and without surprises down the road.

As a second point, we would like to know a way to describe success for this bounty and these mini-grants that Polkadot would be giving to multiple parties. One of our main concerns with hackathons and prizes is their impact. So far, a very minute portion of these submitted projects to hackathons have been continued as a real Polkadot project and even a smaller amount have been of sufficient quality to be considered for funding (We recently had a project submit to OpenGov a UI generated by AI from one of the first ranked websites). So what in your view is the best way to approach this assessment of success for these multiple potential grantees? Preferably speaking with numbers and actual projections. This is important so that in case of a potential refill 12 months down the line or earlier we can assess whether this bounty had success and impact or not.
In short, we certainly would like to avoid the hackathon chasers to deplete this bounty with mini-projects that won't entail anything significant.

I have voted NAY on this proposal. And I want to make sure that everyone knows this NAY is coming from a good place and one of love for the EasyA team.

My main reasons for voting nay are already written down in the discussion thread here: https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/post/2485#a6f2eea0-5c40-4c36-911b-d1defc33d0b1

Here is are some bullet points for those not willing to click the link:

• easya has shown to be a powerhouse in event organization, good vibes, and bringing positive energy to our ecosystem.
• however their content is really under-par from where it should be at. it is actually impossible to believe that any reasonable developers came out of the learning content from the easya app.
• easya talks about all these metrics, and people who have used the app, and love it, but it is objectively obvious that the content is out of date, if not wrong. that the "quizzes and exercises" are not meaningful at all. And that there is no practical action item for users at the end of their easya experience. As such, all of these metrics to me are actually meaningless, if not harmful to know that most people are learning about Polkadot through a platform providing the wrong and weak information.
• I agree this microgrants program is different than the easya app, but the point is that this team has not shown any ability to evaluate or actually facilitate high quality development teams in the ecosystem. Their previous hackathons mostly rewarded people who did solidity, and had almost no intersection with the Polkadot community. I worry that these funds will exactly fall into those hands again, and it would have been our treasury burning money and achieving no results.
• finally i hate the branding here. Whatever easya is doing is far from "University" quality. Indeed they are present at universities, but the name and promises have so many implications about education, on which they truthfully are at a elementary school level right now. This branding is tarnishing the work done by Polkadot Blockchain Academy and the Web3 Foundation Educaiton team, which have actually delivered really high quality content. And it is even more sad to me that easya has not tapped into this content.

So what do think would be good here?
I think that this bounty is too early. the easya team needs to level themselves up in the polkadot ecosystem.

My take is that your next request to the treasury should be to spend money to:

— update your app content

— work on beginner level developer content off the mobile app

— hire people into your org that can actually represent polkadot at a technical level required for fostering high quality teams

— establish funding so that devrel in polkadot can be at all of your events

I would happily support a proposal with these objectives. But this one I cannot.