Polkadot Blockchain Academy Wave 5 Singapore - Demo day seed prize fund proposal

This is a discussion post in relation to https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/referenda/738.

I'm Kai, a Polkadot Ambassador hailing from Singapore, committed to driving forward the decentralized revolution in our city-state! I aim to cultivate an ecosystem where collaboration thrives. As the founder of the Polkadot Singapore Meetup Group (https://www.meetup.com/polkadot-singapore-meetup-group/), we have hosted parachains such as Moonbeam / Astar / HydraDX just to name a few. I seek to create a platform for knowledge exchange and networking within the Polkadot community. We also played host to the livestream Decoded Event held in June 2023.

Recently, I was at the Hong Kong's PBA Wave 4 as a panel judge on heats day. This was sometime in Feb 2024 and I realized that winning teams on demo day did not have any monetary incentives and although the PBA offers guidance, it’s down to them to fund raise post PBA event.

Therefore for Singapore's PBA Wave 5*, happening in May-June 2024 (soon), it is my strong belief that we should allocate a prize pool of 10000 Dots (subject to a change if feedback is for more or less reward) to the top 4 project owners from the pitch finals day to spur them on and keep their motivation up with their project's development. It would also give them a small runway to better flesh out the project they brought to the table and give them time to seek more adequate funding.

I have been in talks with the PBA committee and they are receptive to this idea. ~~If I sense that the community is ok with it, I would work closely with the PBA team with a fuller proposal and I might drop a GDoc link here in time for all of your review.

~~Edit. 1: The proposal is up and I welcome thoughts and comments!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WGBsWSNOJCok0UQsePe1b0S4ggM4nv5VHu1aM9Hmt2Y/edit

Thank you for listening and happy to hear the community's thoughts on this.

*The Singapore PBA event will be held in cooperation with Polkabiz, NUS Enterprise (Singapore's top local university), and the Asian Institute of Digital Finance.

Feedback: Some suggested to increase the prize pool amount. I think its a brilliant idea, however, I am hesitant because

The larger the prize pool, the more it has to be managed properly. At this moment, I nor the PBA team have the bandwidth to do so. For instance, someone would need to be employed to cross check milestones / targets prior to disbursing tranches of the prize pool over a period of time to ensure the funds are used appropriately.

This is only a test of the efficacy of a prize pool to motivate teams to take on the next step. If successful, I am sure the subsequent prize pool would be increased by the next local ambassador for PBA Wave 6.

Also spoken to the PBA team and they would rather that I personally manage the sum of 10,000 DOTs instead of a multi-sig, as it would reduce the hassle to disburse to the winning teams. I am ok to hold on to this responsibility, as I am able to cover this on a personal basis if the dots for some reason become lost. However, I also fully recognize that some may not like this idea, and am proposing to some of the organizers of Wave 5 to do a multi-sig for this. I will update once its agreed.