Hey all,

On Mon, Jun 24, 2019 at 10:25 PM Sam Ruby <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Mon, Jun 24, 2019 at 4:16 PM Jim Jagielski <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> > On 2019/06/24 15:44:40, Myrle Krantz <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > Neutrality, or lack of it, comes when we pick the winners.
> >
> > As mentioned before, this focus on phrasing/defining "neutrality" that
> way is incorrect and misses the point completely.
>
> If the entirety of the concern can be addressed with accounting
> changes, that's good news.  The remaining question is whether proposal
> scoring and acceptance based on scores (like is done at GSoC) could be
> seen as picking winners.  If somebody has that concern, then let's
> discuss it.


I really don't believe we can address the neutrality concern with
accounting changes.  For the real neutrality question, what matters is who
makes the decisions about who gets paid.  And how that decision is made.
Since the accounting changes have no effect on our neutrality, we can do
them, as far as I'm concerned.  Or not.  Either way is fine.

Getting to my main point: I *do* believe that we can effectively address
the real neutrality concern.  In fact, I believe we address neutrality
concerns on a regular basis for programs we already offer.  What we need
is: A.) a group of people we trust to make these decisions and B.) an
application and acceptance process, with published selection criteria.
Unlike in the case of GSoC, we will be selecting project proposals to
submit to Outreachy, instead of interns.  We can submit "too many"
proposals, to hedge against the situation that some proposals don't attract
interns, but this way we'll have an order with which to accept them.

Judging from Sage's response, Outreachy can support us, but isn't going to
be able to provide a complete solution for us here.  So my suggestion would
be that we solve this problem as follows:
A.) The group of people doing the judging should be everyone on the
diversity committee.  Project proposals are not personal information, so
there's no reason not to let everyone help.  Decisions can be made with
straightforward rating (0-5), which makes collaborative judging really
easy.  We have a wide array of expertise here, that should give us
technological, and social components to the judging.  We're actually really
well set up.  D&I is an awesome group!
B.) The selection criteria should be related to what goals we want to
achieve by bringing in Outreachy interns.  I find myself in vehement
agreement with Naomi and Gris on what those goals should be.  I do think
this is one of those sorts of tasks where large groups can be cumbersome
when getting started.  So I hope we can pick a sub-group (2-3 maybe) to
come up with a proposal for selection criteria.

Some questions that occur to me here:
* Do we want to just judge project proposals or do we want to judge interns
too?  That could require a different kind of process.
* How do we want to go about attracting project proposals?  Is there some
synergy we could find here with our GSoC program?
* Can we offer projects some sort of recognition for offering their
mentoring time?
* Am I getting ahead of myself?  Will we not have enough proposals to make
this sort of thing necessary?
* What am I missing?

Please comment!

Best Regards,
Myrle
A Peanut in the Gallery who will now pipe down and focus on listening.

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