[Soc-coordination] Next steps for mentors?

[Nicolas Dandrimont]

Hi,

* Daniel Pocock <daniel at pocock.com.au> [2013-05-05 18:02:36 +0200]:
> Hi,
> 
> This is the first year I volunteer to support Debian's GSoC and OPW
> programs, so I don't know all the details about how people like to do things
> 
> Now that we have applications, can anybody comment on some of the following:
> 
> - is there any policy document (from the Debian admins, not Google)
> describing the process for selection of projects and students?
> 
> - are there specific criteria that need to be rated or ranked when
> reviewing the applications?
>
> - what roles and responsibilities do the prospective mentors take in the
> final decision process?  E.g. do the mentors need to inform Debian's SoC
> admins of their preferred student, or give a rating to each student, or
> something else?

I wanted to send a mail along those lines, and I'll address those three
questions at once:

We don't have a formal policy document for the selection process, as it is very
simple. We have done things that way for a few years now, and it has worked
well so we keep the same process:

Admins ask the mentors to select the best student application for each project
they have proposed. If they aren't really happy with how their applications
turned out, they should tell us so, and we'll drop the project from the "pool".

The GSoC Mentoring guide gives some good insight on what you should check for
when selecting a student:
http://en.flossmanuals.net/GSoCMentoring/selecting-a-student/

Once mentors have given us their shortlists, we have a pool of students we want
to get on board. Google assigns us a number of project slots to fill in. If
there are enough slots for all the students, we are done, and we will give back
the excedent slots to Google. If there aren't enough slots, we as admins have
to make the hard choice of what projects to drop.

To help us in this process, we ask you to make your reviews of proposals known.
This is one of the easy things to do on melange: on the page for a proposal,
just leave a comment keeping the "private" box ticked.

We don't have decided on specific criteria to rank the projects among each
other, and to be honest I hope we won't have to... We'll let you know when we
know how many slots we have and we will have thought it over between admins.

> - I understand the requirement for multiple mentors: do they all need to
> be registered in Melange?  Some people are not keen to create Google
> accounts.  Is it OK to have just one mentor per project in Melange, and
> others listed on the Debian wiki?

Having several mentors listed in melange means that they all can do the
evaluations and the feedback on that interface. Issuing timely evaluations is
critical for us to keep our good standing with Google: for instance, access to
the mentor summit is tied to that, and it might affect their evaluation of our
application to further programs.

If they really, really, *really* don't want to create Google accounts, we can't
really force them to, but that would save all of us some precious time. If all
else fails, the admins can fill in the evaluations, but they will get very
grumpy doing so.

Cheers,
-- 
Nicolas Dandrimont, for the Debian GSoC admins

BOFH excuse #270:
Someone has messed up the kernel pointers
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