Hi Edward, Thanks for this comprehensive answer (and also thanks to participants in the follow-up dissuasion).
How is the "public good" determined? (sounds rather Benthamite). I would have been disappointed if "charts using diagrams" had not been selected yet I don't recall being canvassed. Sorry to sound picky. I think from what you say that in this particular year it was obvious which projects should be selected; in future it may not be. I think an acceptable reason would be "there was only one user who wanted it". Maybe we should use something like: https://www.uservoice.com. Sadly it seems this requires payment but there may be a free equivalent Dominic Steinitz domi...@steinitz.org http://idontgetoutmuch.wordpress.com On 28 May 2013, at 16:11, Edward Kmett <ekm...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi Dominic, > > The proposal is admittedly rather unfortunately opaque. > > The parts I can shed light on: > > Students come up with proposals with the help of the community and then > submit them to google-melange.com. > > A bunch of folks from the haskell community sign up as potential mentors, > vote on and discuss the proposals. (We had ~25 candidate mentors and ~20 > proposals this year). > > The student application template contains a number of desirable criteria for > a successful summer of code application, which is shown on the google-melange > website under our organization -- an old version is available > http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/summer-of-code/wiki/StudApply2012 contains > > Once we have the proposals in hand, and some initial ranking, we ask google > for slots. Allocation is based on past performance, arcane community > parameters that only they know, mentor ratio, etc. This should be our largest > year in the program, despite the fact that in general organizations have been > getting fewer slots as more organizations join, so we're apparently doing > rather well. > > In general we do try to select projects that maximize the public good. Most > of the time this can almost be done by just straight cut off based on the > average score. There is some special casing for duplicate applications > between different students and where students have submitted multiple > applications we can have some flexibility in how to apply them. > > This year we also received an extra couple of special-purpose darcs slots > from Google in exchange for continuing to act as an umbrella organization > over darcs at the request of the administrator of the program at Google. In > previous years I had requested an extra slot for them, this year the request > came in the other direction. > > We do inevitably get more good proposals than we get slots. This year we > could have easily used another 3-4 slots to good effect. > > The main part I can't shed light on: > > Google requests that the final vote tallies remain private. This is done so > that students who put in proposals to a high volume orgs and don't get > accepted, or who are new to the process and don't quite catch all the rules, > don't wind up with any sort of publicly visible black mark. This > unfortunately means, that we can't really show the unaccepted proposals with > information about how to avoid getting your proposal rejected. > > I hope that helps. If you have any more questions or if my answer didn't > suffice please feel free to follow up! > > -Edward Kmett > > > > On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 6:52 AM, Dominic Steinitz <domi...@steinitz.org> > wrote: > Hi Edward, > > Although the project I am interested in (as a user) has been accepted :-), I > can't help feeling the selection process is a bit opaque. Is it documented > somewhere and I just missed it? Apologies if I did. > > BTW I appreciate all the hard work that goes into the selection process. > > Dominic Steinitz > domi...@steinitz.org > http://idontgetoutmuch.wordpress.com > >
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