[Soc-coordination] Deciding on our applications

[Steve McIntyre]

Hi to all the mentors and any students that may be listening in!

By my reckoning, the deadline for student applications comes up later
on today, after being extended a couple of times already. The students
will be finished for a short while.

Our next step is to work out exactly which applications we like the
best, ranking them accordingly ready for Google people to look at and
decide how many we get. We have a *lot* of applications to rank this
year; despite my best efforts in bouncing clearly-irrelevant ones on
to Google, I see 94 still listed. They will take a *lot* of time for
everybody to look at everything, so unless everybody wants to spend a
few hours each in the next week I think we'll be better off organising
in groups. As an admin, I've already skimmed through all the
applications I could see last night and added comments on many of
them, but I don't expect everybody to do that.

So, how to proceed?

I suggest:

 1. Mentors identify all the projects that match up with their own
    suggestions (e.g. I'll take all the various CD-tester apps) and
    identify them here on the list as ready for review

 2. For each application that doesn't match our suggestions, please
    volunteer to act as a reviewer for it if you know the area
    well. If there are any more with no primary reviewers, then admins
    will assign to mentors who look comparatively free.

 3. Once we have a primary reviewer organised for each application, we
    can work from there. For each application, I suggest we pick five
    others of our mentors (randomly) to also read the application and
    provide comments and evaluations. If there any other projects that
    you have strong feelings on, please dive in also. It is up to the
    primary reviewer to act as a guide in terms of the application
    details if necessary (e.g. I know nothing about OVAL, but can help
    explain the CD tester app)

 4. We total up the scores for each application, and normalise the
    scores appropriately to give us a reasonable spread at the top.
    e.g. we don't want 5 of the CD tester applications when other
    potentially good projects may score just slightly lower.

 5. Last round of comments / reviews. Maybe an IRC meeting of
    interested mentors (TBD) for any last ordering tweaks

 6. Ready for submissions to Google

How does that sound?

-- 
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK.                                steve at einval.com
"I suspect most samba developers are already technically insane... Of
 course, since many of them are Australians, you can't tell." -- Linus Torvalds