[limesurvey-developers] Woohoo! [and] Next stage in GSoC applications process

[Jason C. <ja...@cl...>]

Hi everyone,

 

Well, we've got a STACKLOAD of student applications this year, and the
quality overall seems higher than last year. Which presents us with the
welcome but difficult problem of narrowing the field down!

 

To the students

I'd like to thank every student who has made a proposal for the effort they
have put in. As a development community we only wish we were able to take on
more students and have more people involved in developing LimeSurvey. We
hope you'll understand that we can't pick all of you, and unfortunately
because there are so many applications some of you who have made very worthy
attempts this year will not be selected. We're sorry about that, and hope
you will remain involved with the LimeSurvey community in any case.

 

Over the next few days we'll be doing preliminary sorting of the
applications, and we'll be ranking them in order within a week. We may fire
off some questions to some of you during this time to clarify certain
points, so please check your emails regularly J

 

To the mentors

We have requested 6 student slots from Google, so in my opinion our ultimate
aim should be to narrow down the student applications to the best 10 and
then rank them in the order we would like them to be assigned (knowing that
after about number 3 we probably can't count on having them assigned, we
just have to hope for applications 4, 5 and 6).

 

We don't need to complete the ranking immediately, but we do have to get a
rough idea - because Carol has said:

 

"Secondly, I want to point out something I didn't mention in the original
email: **Orgs will never get more slots from the slotting algorithm than
they have mentors assigned.** So please, while you are reviewing proposals
today and Monday, assign all your mentors to at least one proposal to ensure
you get the highest possible number of slots."

 

What this means is that we need to assign mentors to the most likely
applications. This goes beyond clicking the "I'd be interested in mentoring
this student". Only Carsten or I can assign a mentor. After assigning
mentors, we can change them again later, but if we don't assign them before
Monday SFO time, we won't necessarily get our maximum number of student
slots.

 

So to help us get moving along this path I'd like every mentor to give me a
list of their top 5 student applications that they would be interested in
mentoring. I'll go through those lists and then assign mentors to those
applications accordingly. We can discuss the finer details at a later stage,
remember that these assignments will be preliminary only.

 

Then, if you want, send a second list of 5 applications you aren't
interested in mentoring, but which you think are very worthy.

 

The lists should be the name of the student, followed by the name of the
project.

ie: 

1.       Jason Cleeland, Automatic Rating System for GSoC Students

2.       Carsten Schmitz, Instantaneous Webserver Relocation Proposal

3.       Marcel Minke, AI IRC reply system for weird user questions

4.       Thibault Le Meur, Conditioning Conditions - a new methodology

5.       Mac Duy Hai, Integrating LS2 with Google Wave

 

Getting a list of everyone's top 5 applications will also mean we've found a
good way of narrowing down the application list to 20 or 30. I propose we
generally work on off-web lists for this sort of thing.


I would be interested in everyone's views if you think we should approach
this In a different way, but we'll need to sort it out in the next day or
two. J

 

Finally, I these discussions about students and rankings need to be kept
off-list (I'm just sending it out here so that students on the list can see
the process we're using, and in case any of my email addresses for mentors
are out of date) - so please reply just to all mentors, and not to the
limesurvey-developers list.

 

Jason Cleeland

LimeSurvey GSoC  Administrator