The discussion was kickstarted on October 9th with this discussion: https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/post/2503 and seeks to close the BD bounty - bounty 39 due to inaction and lack of structure and planning. https://polkadot.subsquare.io/treasury/bounties/39

The main concern is the lack of activity and deliverables of this bounty. As expressed by the original discussion, this bounty was meant to be reactive to other external business development efforts but in 8 months it's had no activity.

Important comments like Ingo Rube an original member of the bounty suggesting that the bounty should be closed as it meant to be retroactive and high quality. Alternatives proposed by him were: centralized coordination from the W3F or bringing up teams with +2M USD deals closed i.e a heavy track record in order to reconsider such bounty again. https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/post/2503#q8Js8RZhd8npmgNsQJlN

The rest of the comments focused mostly on the lack of activity and focus as the main reason for why this bounty should be closed, concerns we also share with respect with this bounty.

There is a counterparty referendum that is live concurrently that seeks to redesign the BD bounty with https://x.com/crisnguyen99 at the helm. We planned with to launch both referenda concurrently so that the closing bounty referenda would have a somewhat viable alternative.

The counterproposal seeks to change curators to: Vincent Chan, Cris Nguỵen, Thibault Perréard, Zachary “Yung Beef” Edwards, Albert Burgos, Technical Support: Luca Poggi. The link to the full counterproposal discussion with title: “Propose to revamp Polkadot BD Bounty with New Curator Set and Structure” https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/post/2559 Link to the referendum soon.

Link to the full counterparty proposal: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gRc-jOHnNr646_9cXG8qZyz-jCmcCAh-lXwoXWDRvqY/edit?tab=t.0

Saxemberg will be voting in favor of the closure of bounty 39 and against the counterproposal as we hold the view that BD is not well suited for such a bounty in the present and proposed conditions conditions and further work and deliveries have to be considered first.

A second point is that BD on Polkadot seems unfit to be managed by a single team as different DF, BD, dApp teams have a diverse set of skills, goals, locations/geographies and activities so a unification in this sense doesn’t make sense at present.

Past efforts have had a variety degrees of success and the current alternative (counterproposal) doesn't guarantee a high degree of deliveries either.

EDIT Nov 26th 2024.

https://x.com/saxemberg/status/1861025419140485318

According to Cris Nguyen, they won't be pursuing a counterproposal that seeks to change curators and revisit B39. Instead they will attempt to create a new Business Development bounty sometime the future. Make sure to vote in that one too. Hopefully when that happens, referendum 1297 sets a precedent for BD operations and bounties.