Re: [Haskell-cafe] [haskell.org Google Summer of Code 2013] Approved Projects
I will certainly volunteer (to mentor) next year if I feel I can add value. Dominic Steinitz domi...@steinitz.org http://idontgetoutmuch.wordpress.com On 2 Jun 2013, at 17:23, Edward Kmett ekm...@gmail.com wrote: Public good is a nebulous concept, but it is something that each of the folks who sign up as mentors judges independently when they are rating the projects and talking about them. Most of the folks who are offering to mentor have been involved in the community for quite some time and have a pretty good overview of what is going on, and what are currently active pain points. With 25 mentors we get a pretty good cross section of the community. We aren't really able to canvas outside of the mentor group during the approval process by google's guidelines, since we shouldn't leak information about unaccepted projects. Something like that uservoice site might be used to gauge public opinion of general ideas before the proposals start coming in, but in the end students write the proposals we get, so the things we would have polled about are inevitably not quite what we're rating anyways. We rarely get something that is just cut and pasted from the ideas list. Consequently a generic rating that doesn't take into consideration the actual proposal isn't worth a whole lot, beyond giving students an idea of what might be a successful proposal. There is a lot of variability in the ratings for projects based simply on what we know about the student, how clear the proposal is, and how achievable his or her particular goals are. In practice, we've been able to make sure that a couple of slots go to separable tasks in projects like cabal, haddock, and ghc that benefit everyone and that exceptional one-off projects don't get shut out completely just by asking each mentor to rate all of the projects, even the ones they aren't interested in mentoring, and from the discussions between the mentors and between the mentors and students that ensue within melange. My main advice is that if you want to get involved in the process, the easiest way to peel back the curtain is to volunteer to mentor! We're generally quite open to adding new voices to the discussion. -Edward On Sun, Jun 2, 2013 at 10:14 AM, Dominic Steinitz domi...@steinitz.org wrote: 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
Re: [Haskell-cafe] [haskell.org Google Summer of Code 2013] Approved Projects
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 ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] [haskell.org Google Summer of Code 2013] Approved Projects
Public good is a nebulous concept, but it is something that each of the folks who sign up as mentors judges independently when they are rating the projects and talking about them. Most of the folks who are offering to mentor have been involved in the community for quite some time and have a pretty good overview of what is going on, and what are currently active pain points. With 25 mentors we get a pretty good cross section of the community. We aren't really able to canvas outside of the mentor group during the approval process by google's guidelines, since we shouldn't leak information about unaccepted projects. Something like that uservoice site might be used to gauge public opinion of general ideas before the proposals start coming in, but in the end students write the proposals we get, so the things we would have polled about are inevitably not quite what we're rating anyways. We rarely get something that is just cut and pasted from the ideas list. Consequently a generic rating that doesn't take into consideration the actual proposal isn't worth a whole lot, beyond giving students an idea of what might be a successful proposal. There is a lot of variability in the ratings for projects based simply on what we know about the student, how clear the proposal is, and how achievable his or her particular goals are. In practice, we've been able to make sure that a couple of slots go to separable tasks in projects like cabal, haddock, and ghc that benefit everyone and that exceptional one-off projects don't get shut out completely just by asking each mentor to rate all of the projects, even the ones they aren't interested in mentoring, and from the discussions between the mentors and between the mentors and students that ensue within melange. My main advice is that if you want to get involved in the process, the easiest way to peel back the curtain is to volunteer to mentor! We're generally quite open to adding new voices to the discussion. -Edward On Sun, Jun 2, 2013 at 10:14 AM, Dominic Steinitz domi...@steinitz.orgwrote: 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/StudApply2012contains 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
Re: [Haskell-cafe] [haskell.org Google Summer of Code 2013] Approved Projects
Similarly (to some degree), in the ML world John Reppy had a very nice system that employed user customization via combinators rather than inference to generate application/library specific FFIs, see: http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~jhr/papers/2006/gpce-fig.pdf On 29 May 2013 18:57, Jason Dagit dag...@gmail.com wrote: Are you folks aware of the work on this topic by Tristan Ravitch? https://github.com/travitch/foreign-inference Jason ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] [haskell.org Google Summer of Code 2013] Approved Projects
thanks for these references all. As some folks who help with GSOC mentoring have pointed out offline, this summers work is not to be a research project, but a concretely achievable over the summer by a single student project. if we hit hard obstacles i'll help sort out a concrete path that maintains a path to success, but research here isn't the goal. rather lets make something that WORKS WELL. Sometimes the novelty requirements for research are contrary to the best tech choices for building robust usable tools. point being, thanks for sharing the fun reading, if any can help the student along, i'm happy to pass it along, but lets not nerd snipe students into other projects. (i'm bad enough with that for myself as is :) ) On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 2:27 PM, Stephen Tetley stephen.tet...@gmail.comwrote: Similarly (to some degree), in the ML world John Reppy had a very nice system that employed user customization via combinators rather than inference to generate application/library specific FFIs, see: http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~jhr/papers/2006/gpce-fig.pdf On 29 May 2013 18:57, Jason Dagit dag...@gmail.com wrote: Are you folks aware of the work on this topic by Tristan Ravitch? https://github.com/travitch/foreign-inference Jason ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] [haskell.org Google Summer of Code 2013] Approved Projects
Edward Kmett ekmett at gmail.com writes: * Haskell Qt Binding Generator by Zhengliang Feng, mentored by Carter Schonwald with help from Ian-Woo Kim Interesting, as this has been done at least twice before. Is there a public write-up of what's going to be different this time? ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] [haskell.org Google Summer of Code 2013] Approved Projects
There should be a link from the google-melange website, but one slight shift in focus is on either getting SWIG bindings or possibly even using Ian-Woo Kim's C++FFI tools. Carter may be able to go into more detail. On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 6:46 AM, harry volderm...@hotmail.com wrote: Edward Kmett ekmett at gmail.com writes: * Haskell Qt Binding Generator by Zhengliang Feng, mentored by Carter Schonwald with help from Ian-Woo Kim Interesting, as this has been done at least twice before. Is there a public write-up of what's going to be different this time? ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] [haskell.org Google Summer of Code 2013] Approved Projects
This one caught my attention as well. I didn't see any contact information for the participants (I didn't look too hard, I admit), but I was wondering if they had considered basing their work off of Qt Smoke. The smoke project (http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Languages/Smoke) is used by a few other Qt bindings projects and provides some common infrastructure and already went through the trouble of parsing all of the headers in a qt-friendly way. I think smoke would have the advantage of sharing the burden with other language bindings (Ruby, C#, and perl, at least). Perhaps an argument could be made that requiring smoke might be painful, but I imagine it could be tossed into a cabal package fairly easily. I started playing with generating Qt bindings for Haskell with smoke if the GSoC project might find it useful: https://github.com/travitch/humidor On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 11:51:57AM -0400, Edward Kmett wrote: There should be a link from the google-melange website, but one slight shift in focus is on either getting SWIG bindings or possibly even using Ian-Woo Kim's C++FFI tools. Carter may be able to go into more detail. On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 6:46 AM, harry volderm...@hotmail.com wrote: Edward Kmett ekmett at gmail.com writes: * Haskell Qt Binding Generator by Zhengliang Feng, mentored by Carter Schonwald with help from Ian-Woo Kim Interesting, as this has been done at least twice before. Is there a public write-up of what's going to be different this time? ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe pgpoxeI7JJ1Il.pgp Description: PGP signature ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] [haskell.org Google Summer of Code 2013] Approved Projects
Edward Kmett ekmett at gmail.com writes: There should be a link from the google-melange website, but one slight shift in focus is on either getting SWIG bindings or possibly even using Ian-Woo Kim's C++FFI tools. Carter may be able to go into more detail. There's almost no information in the google project abstract. My concern is that the problem isn't generating the bindings (as I've said, that's been done twice before). It's that Qt's slots-and-signals are horrible to use from the Haskell side. If the student hasn't already got a good idea of how to solve this, I fear that this project will be just generate another unusable set of bindings. ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] [haskell.org Google Summer of Code 2013] Approved Projects
When submissions are put in, there is a way for mentors to talk to students to ask for more details. Those don't show up in the published abstract you can see at the end. The discussion shifted towards focusing on getting things to a point where Haskell can meaningfully use SWIG rather than on Qt per se but it is good to keep such a concrete goal in mind when working on something as abstract as SWIG. I agree that Qt has a somewhat horrible API. =) -Edward On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 12:34 PM, harry volderm...@hotmail.com wrote: Edward Kmett ekmett at gmail.com writes: There should be a link from the google-melange website, but one slight shift in focus is on either getting SWIG bindings or possibly even using Ian-Woo Kim's C++FFI tools. Carter may be able to go into more detail. There's almost no information in the google project abstract. My concern is that the problem isn't generating the bindings (as I've said, that's been done twice before). It's that Qt's slots-and-signals are horrible to use from the Haskell side. If the student hasn't already got a good idea of how to solve this, I fear that this project will be just generate another unusable set of bindings. ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] [haskell.org Google Summer of Code 2013] Approved Projects
indeed, i'm the principal mentor for this project, though as mentioned Ian-Woo will hopefully be helping out too. I'm going to *help* focus the project on being a tool thats not focused on QT, though if something nice can be worked out in that direction, great! indeed, I suspect Edward, Ian-Woo and I will spend some small amount of time at HackPhi trying to figure out some good avenues of attack to make this a successful project that is used by the community and as actively maintained. cheers -Carter On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 12:55 PM, Edward Kmett ekm...@gmail.com wrote: When submissions are put in, there is a way for mentors to talk to students to ask for more details. Those don't show up in the published abstract you can see at the end. The discussion shifted towards focusing on getting things to a point where Haskell can meaningfully use SWIG rather than on Qt per se but it is good to keep such a concrete goal in mind when working on something as abstract as SWIG. I agree that Qt has a somewhat horrible API. =) -Edward On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 12:34 PM, harry volderm...@hotmail.com wrote: Edward Kmett ekmett at gmail.com writes: There should be a link from the google-melange website, but one slight shift in focus is on either getting SWIG bindings or possibly even using Ian-Woo Kim's C++FFI tools. Carter may be able to go into more detail. There's almost no information in the google project abstract. My concern is that the problem isn't generating the bindings (as I've said, that's been done twice before). It's that Qt's slots-and-signals are horrible to use from the Haskell side. If the student hasn't already got a good idea of how to solve this, I fear that this project will be just generate another unusable set of bindings. ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] [haskell.org Google Summer of Code 2013] Approved Projects
On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 10:47 AM, Carter Schonwald carter.schonw...@gmail.com wrote: indeed, i'm the principal mentor for this project, though as mentioned Ian-Woo will hopefully be helping out too. I'm going to *help* focus the project on being a tool thats not focused on QT, though if something nice can be worked out in that direction, great! Are you folks aware of the work on this topic by Tristan Ravitch? https://github.com/travitch/foreign-inference Jason ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] [haskell.org Google Summer of Code 2013] Approved Projects
Ooo. Thanks Jason. That looks like a fleshed out version of the approach I was leaning towards at least thinking about. I'll check it out when I have time in a few days. On May 29, 2013 1:57 PM, Jason Dagit dag...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 10:47 AM, Carter Schonwald carter.schonw...@gmail.com wrote: indeed, i'm the principal mentor for this project, though as mentioned Ian-Woo will hopefully be helping out too. I'm going to *help* focus the project on being a tool thats not focused on QT, though if something nice can be worked out in that direction, great! Are you folks aware of the work on this topic by Tristan Ravitch? https://github.com/travitch/foreign-inference Jason ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] [haskell.org Google Summer of Code 2013] Approved Projects
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 ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] [haskell.org Google Summer of Code 2013] Approved Projects
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/StudApply2012contains 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.orgwrote: 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 ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] [haskell.org Google Summer of Code 2013] Approved Projects
On 29/05/2013, at 1:11 AM, Edward Kmett wrote: This unfortunately means, that we can't really show the unaccepted proposals with information about how to avoid getting your proposal rejected. You can if you rewrite the key points of proposal to retain the overall message, but remove identifying information. I think it would be helpful to write up some of the general reasons for projects being rejected. I tried to do this for Haskell experience reports, on the Haskell Symposium experience report advice page. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/HaskellSymposium/ExperienceReports I'd imagine you could write up some common proposal / rejection / advice tuples like: Proposal: I want to write a MMORPG in Haskell, because this would be a good demonstration for Haskell in a large real world project. We can use this as a platform to develop the networking library infrastructure. Rejection: This project is much too big, and the production of a MMORPG wouldn't benefit the community as a whole. Advice: If you know of specific problems in the networking library infrastructure, then focus on those, using specific examples of where people have tried to do something and failed. Ben. ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] [haskell.org Google Summer of Code 2013] Approved Projects
The majority of the rejections are of precisely that form, or just were slightly out-competed by another similar proposal in their space. These items either are stated or should be stated in the student application guidelines, but a successful summer of code submission probably has most of the following attributes: * *A good timeline* -- It is easy to miss this one! At one extreme, we've had proposals that just never submitted any details beyond a paragraph saying something would be nice to have. Other red flags are projects that promise the moon, but come from someone nobody knows (there is nothing wrong with promising the moon if everyone knows you can deliver it!) or which look like they close out an easy issue that someone could bang out in a weekend. We've passed on otherwise decent proposals that just completely lacked any details about how they were going to get there, as there is really no good way for a mentor to judge progress. Speaking of whom, it is useful to have... * *Some idea of who the mentor could be* -- We came very close to not finding mentors for a couple of projects, despite community interest. As a corollary, if you are interested in having something happen in the community, stepping up to mentor it along is a good first step to making it a reality! We generally can find mentors for projects, but having already reached out to someone beforehand helps show that you have... * *A student who has already started to get involved in the community* -- Haskell generally has a long ramp up, its rather hard to learn it on the fly if you've never really used it, and still accomplish some other goal. Students with a long history of good commits to a project are generally taken before ones of whom we're less sure. Without knowledge of haskell you are unlikely to have... * *Demonstrable impact on the community as a whole* -- Proposals that work on a specific aspect of something we all use generally see good responses. We definitely tend to favor projects that benefit the community as a whole over ones that improve niches. Work on Cabal, GHC, Hackage is a much easier to sell, than say me getting someone to hack on my kan-extensions library, which doesn't have many users, but at least it is... * *Not a greenfield project* -- In general we're a bit gunshy about students designing libraries from scratch. Your MMORPG example fits that mold. It'd likely be a completely new project, which brings with it a lot of design decisions, and it comes with no pre-existing users impacted by the project, so it is easy to flounder and have nobody care. For instance, we have routinely received submissions to build a library for type level programming, but we already have several that have failed to gain much traction. What discriminates the new design from the old? Now, if the library already exists and has begun to pick up traction and has users? You might be able to make a case for a summer of code project to improve it. I just can't think of such a proposal that we've had in recent years. -Edward On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 8:24 PM, Ben Lippmeier b...@ouroborus.net wrote: On 29/05/2013, at 1:11 AM, Edward Kmett wrote: This unfortunately means, that we can't really show the unaccepted proposals with information about how to avoid getting your proposal rejected. You can if you rewrite the key points of proposal to retain the overall message, but remove identifying information. I think it would be helpful to write up some of the general reasons for projects being rejected. I tried to do this for Haskell experience reports, on the Haskell Symposium experience report advice page. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/HaskellSymposium/ExperienceReports I'd imagine you could write up some common proposal / rejection / advice tuples like: Proposal: I want to write a MMORPG in Haskell, because this would be a good demonstration for Haskell in a large real world project. We can use this as a platform to develop the networking library infrastructure. Rejection: This project is much too big, and the production of a MMORPG wouldn't benefit the community as a whole. Advice: If you know of specific problems in the networking library infrastructure, then focus on those, using specific examples of where people have tried to do something and failed. Ben. ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
