As the title suggests, this proposal aims to address two things:
First, curators were automatically unassigned from several active bounties due to missed expiry extensions. Unfortunately, this opened the door for an anonymous account to step in and manually unassign curators with trollish remarks (see: https://polkadot.subscan.io/extrinsic/26285556-2, https://polkadot.subscan.io/extrinsic/26273900-3, https://polkadot.subscan.io/extrinsic/26180790-3) likely not in good faith.
To restore continuity and avoid any further delays in bounty ops, this referendum proposes reinstating the same curator addresses for the following bounties:
All three teams have been contacted and are aligned on restoring the original curator setup. Going forward, this issue should no longer arise: a runtime upgrade will eventually allow bounty expiry to be set to 0, removing the need for curators to manually renew their role every 90 days.
Secondly, as part of this referendum, I am also taking the opportunity to do some light housekeeping by closing down bounties that are no longer active, to reduce clutter. The following bounties are proposed for closure due to prolonged inactivity, lack of funding, or insufficient information:
What is going on with the Pioneers Prize bounty? This bounty has ~750k DOT in it but is rarely used. Maybe it's better to let these funds be reallocated? It would be great to get an update on that bounty, how it works, it's current purpose and goals.
https://polkadot.subsquare.io/treasury/child-bounties?parentBountyId=10