I've made a few important amendments, although this draft is fairly
good, AFAICT. Thanks for taking the time to write this.
SVN-like markers
A = Add something, M= modified something, D= deleted something.
These are generally followed by the line to be added, or a compare of
the wording to be changed, in quotation marks. Most of the text I
wrote isn't in quotes; that text is commentary on why I feel the
change is necessary.
On Jun 2, 2009, at 6:31 PM, Noy wrote:
Hello all.
I've completed a draft policy, which has been commented on by a few
people. I'm copy and pasting it here... hopefully there won't be any
formatting issues... if there are I'll make a wiki or something.
Wesnoth Summer of Art Scholarship
Aim:
The overall aim of this scholarship is two fold;
#1 – To assist in the development of student artists over the summer.
#2 – Provide the Wesnoth Project with usable art for its own purposes.
Secondary aims include:
#1 – testing out a usable structure for future projects of this type.
#2 – establishing a system by which the project can build up its
artistic talent base.
Considerations.
Financial (project)
- Wesnoth is a relatively small project with a limited
financial base.
o The scholarship must be sustainable given our financial
situation.
Financial (individual)
- Financial remuneration must be significant enough to ensure
the applicant can accomplish the tasks at hand.
This is rather prim legalese, I think we can state more clearly:
M - "Payment to students must be large enough to free up time for them
to work on wesnoth. It should be comparable to part-time summer jobs,
and/or work study programs through colleges."
It's precisely those things that we're competing with. Students
generally are forced to get a job (often at their parent's insistence)
to help pay for school. We're trying to compete with these jobs
partly to be nice people - these jobs are often brain-dead manual
labor (such as foodservice or janitorial work), which have zero
relation to a student's interests.
Which it is, fortunately; for one example, work study at my college
was about $1600/yr. But of course we knew this in advance, or we'd
have dismissed this entire project out of hand. :)
Quality of Candidates
- While the scholarship is open to students, a basic level of
quality must be maintained.
Oversight
- Adequate oversight is required to ensure the program
operates within its stated parameters.
Cultural:
- The program must not be simply a program to supply money to
individuals for art.
M - "a program to supply money to individuals for art" -> "an excuse
to pay 'bounties' to people to create art."
A - "It's to give a chance to work on wesnoth, to students who
otherwise couldn't - instead of being forced to take a less
educational summer job."
'bounties' are an established way of incentivizing code/art assets for
OSS projects; however, we should make a point of the fact that we're
not doing that. Our team has not agreed that that's a good idea.
WSAS Parameters
Payments
Structure. The applicant stage will run from June 1st to June 20th
The mentorship program will run from June 21st until September 13th
The Wesnoth Summer Art Scholarship (WSAS) will be structured in a
similar fashion to Wesnoth’s Google Summer of Code program.
Jetryl will serve as a mentor for students and oversee their
selection, in conjunction with other developers/mentors.
The IRC channel #Wesnoth-mentor and the mailing list will serve as
the primary communication forums.
Selection;
The individuals selected for the WSAS must be able to contribute art
that can be added to the program with a reasonable amount of
correction
A - "A good rule of thumb is that the corrections that would need to
be applied to their work should not take as long or longer than it
would take for an experienced artist to just create the art from
scratch, themselves."
The individual may be from outside the immediate project
The program will not be actively advertised at this time.
Proposals will be judged by;
i. The
innovativeness of the applicant’s proposal
D - We should delete this entire entry, because innovativeness in
proposals would actually be a *bad* thing. Being innovative; e.g.
coming up with new ideas in a proposal, would imply coming up with a
new type of "art asset"; some whole new category of art for the game.
Innovative individual pieces would be good, but new ideas for the
master plan would be bad. They'd create so much work that one person
during a summer couldn't possibly do all of it, and it would spill
onto the core team; either we'd have to cope by doing even more work
to make the rest of the project match, or we'd have to throw their
work away.
Even if someone created one and filled out content for a new art
category, for all our mainline campaigns, start to finish, it might
not be entirely 'a good thing', because all other content in the game
would be expected to follow suit. This could be especially bad if it
were some small 'vertical space' of art skill which our current
contributors have no ability in. For example, if someone proposed and
created 3d cutscenes, pretty much our entire art team will be left in
the cold. There are a lot of directions I want to avoid going in, not
because they wouldn't be interesting, but because they'd quickly
become unmanageable and unmaintainable, which are already issues we're
hard-pressed on. Getting things done is a matter of focus.
Staying within our current categories is decidedly non-innovative;
however, innovation like this should not be performed this late in a
game development cycle; definitely not if we've got such a wide
'horizontal' amount of content. That kind of innovation belongs in a
rapid-prototyping stage early in a development cycle, where additions
and deletions can be done before committing to making large amounts of
content.
A better subterm would be "i. The usefulness of the proposed art for
the project."
ii. The perceived
ability of the applicant to achieve the milestones
Applicants’ requirements;
Applicants must submit their proposals to the project by June 15th
2009.
The proposals require a proposal for their personal objectives, as
well as a structure several milestones
i. Each milestone
must have a definable goal for the advance of artistic skills.
M - "Each milestone must have a definable goal for what pieces will be
finished."
In principle, a nice idea, in practice, especially at such a low level
of granularity (a few weeks time), it'll be hard for them to
formulate; and only rarely would individual pieces better suit them to
advancing one artistic skill over another. It's better to have a
single overall goal for the entire internship.
Also, I think it's unrealistic to expect most applying artists to have
strong technical jargon about skill-chains. There's not a unanimously
accepted 'best practice' for learning art, and for what skills to seek
in sequence.
ii. Students are
encouraged to discuss potential proposals with Jetryl or other
artists before they submit their final copy.
The proposal should be done on a wiki page at Wesnoth.org
If the applicant is not an active art contributor at present, a
portfolio is required demonstrating adequate skills.
i. They will also
require a questionnaire about their interests and experience.
Jetryl and other developers will discuss the proposals from June
15th and notify successful parties before June 21st.
Mentoring
Milestones will occur every three weeks, with four in total.
Students will need to have one to three examples of art for each
milestone
M - I'm not sure if to modify or remove this; however, in looking over
their work, we're not sampling a small subset of their work to see if
it's up to snuff, we're sampling every last piece.
If this was meant as a minimum number of pieces they should do, it
should probably be stated as such:
"Students are expected to finish at least X number of art works by
each milestone."
i. The
requirements vary according to the milestones proposed by the student.
If deemed adequate, the student will be awarded a proportion of the
total fund at each milestone.
The mentor must also produce a short explanation to the student to
his progress during each
i. This will also
serve as a mechanism for oversight.
ii. It must be
produced before funds are disbursed
If the student fails in two successive milestones, he or she will be
removed from the project.
Payment Method
To be determined depending on the student and the location and
preferred payment method.
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