Comments in Text. Most are acceptable and I think we can go forward on
this by this weekend.... we might have to push back timeline by a week
though.
On 9-Jun-09, at 1:12 AM, Richard Kettering III wrote:
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. :)
This is splitting hairs, as its not going to alter the amount we're
going to give, which is $1500 per student.
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.
Sure, I only put it in there to state it clearly.
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."
Your formulation could be a little more defined, but is acceptable.
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."
Fine by me.
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.
Personally I did not envisage this process to be accomplish by
themselves but in discussions with you. If you could accommodate some
sort of educational structure into the winning proposals, before or
after, I think that would greatly benefit any future attempt we might
make and the value of this project for present students.
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."
Milestones were a general point raised in discussions to ensure the
scholarship had effective oversight. Tying them to defined artistic
goals was an attempt to ensure the educational aspect of the project
was front and centre. However we organize the offering, it must have
milestones with reporting requirements, but as I noted above how the
educational aspect occurs can be defined as it goes along.
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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