Hi Gabriel

First of all, thanks for taking the time to vote and comment on our proposal.

We are aware of your contributions and involvement in this topic, we are also aware of your attention to the dollar value and whether proposals should return funds to the treasury.

Your opinions and suggestions are very valuable and they would have been very appreciated if done during the 13 days of discussion on Polkassembly and the Direction Channel.
We now have to face a ‘nay’ vote from a respected community member such as yourself, maybe many others, without having been approached before our on-chain submission. We are also possibly being linked to people, in no way connected to us, that have used the treasury for their own personal gain, not caring about the community. To be honest, this does not look fair.

This being said, the least we can do now is to address some of your concerns, in the hope that they will clarify similar doubts other participants may have.

First, our proposal is for the foundation for the Italian Polkadot Hub. It contains software developments and other activities which cannot be included in a bounty because they are to be carried out by team members.

Connected to that, we need a consolidation phase in terms of content (there is a lack of Italian content) and a solid distribution channel before thinking about a bounty. We want to engage more Italian speakers and increment the knowledge and awareness of the Polkadot ecosystem within the Italian community. A bounty at this point wouldn’t be productive, as it would inefficiently distribute the content across many private profiles and channels that don’t have enough traction to be impactful. A proposal also ensures a certain margin of flexibility, so we'll be able to adjust the processes while building, if the Italian community responds differently from how we are foreseeing. We already have plans to open to other people through bounties (or join one fairly supported by the community) as soon as our structure is sufficiently tested.

Moreover, just before our submission, we got to know that our proposal has been mentioned and praised by the people who are working on a new bounty system for the production of content. For example, it was said that “They have done [the Italian team] a lot of good work there [in their proposal]” and some of our ideas and structures were taken and merged to have “A bounty program that everyone is happy with”. We think this is proof that our approach is trustworthy and futureproof (to establish future bounties as we already said).

In summary:

1. We spent a lot of time thinking about the details of our proposal, in particular so that we could set up bounties for future phases of the project.
2. We have worked closely with Parity during various draft iterations and before submitting our proposal.
3. In our team we have the Italian Head Ambassador and one of the Curators of the Anti-Scam initiative, which is a sign of professionalism and transparency.

Last, our blog is going to be built using Subsocial Network and all content will be stored on it. Furthermore, the blog will be open sourced, so that every project or network participant will be able to create their own decentralised blog. We believe that this will bring value to the network, something that goes beyond content production.

As for your other concerns: we have provided a very detailed budget breakdown, the amount of content we are planning to deliver, a list of implementations needed, and transparently shared some of the current metrics. These are not divided in milestones, but we will create open reports so that anyone could monitor the status of each activity and reach out in case of any doubts.
If you think any other metrics need to be included, please feel free to reach out to us and we will be happy to work with you.

We hope we could give you and all other readers/voters a better understanding of our proposal and its background. We are always open to any constructive idea or suggestion from you or anybody else.