[boost] [GSoC] Proposal reviewing

Subject: [boost] [GSoC] Proposal reviewing
From: Andrew Sutton (asutton.list_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-04-09 14:05:21

Mentors,

We need to establish some guidelines for reviewing proposals. They
won't be complicated :) I'm opting not to use the mentors mailing list
for this announcement. I know that all the mentors are subscribed
here.

Here's how this should work:
1. Identify the set of proposals for projects that you are interested
in mentoring.
2. Evaluate the proposal and write your evaluation as a PRIVATE comment.
3. If you have questions of the student, you can write PUBLIC comments
or send them an email.
4. Rank the proposal (I think 5 is the best this year). That would be
the project that you want to mentor.

Towards the end of the review process, we will select the 10 best
proposals. This doesn't guarantee that we'll *fund* 10 proposals, just
that I've requested 10 slots.

I would like, this year, if all students got feedback regarding their
proposals even if they are clearly rejects. The reason for writing
evaluations privately, for now, is that it will help me write a public
summary for proposals that are not accepted. I'll figure out how this
is going to work over the course of the week :)

Specific evaluation criteria are up to you (the mentors). You may ask
students to modify good proposals. You do not need to ask *all*
students to improve their proposals.

At the end of the week, you should have a list of 1 or 2 proposals
that *you yourself* will mentor. If you are not offering to mentor the
project, please don't review it as a 5. Otherwise, we end up with a
case where we have to assign a mentor to a project that they aren't
interested in. I don't think that this has worked out very well in the
past.

Also, would prefer that comments regarding specific proposals not be
sent to the list. I don't think it would be a good idea for a flood of
"this proposal is AWFUL" emails to start popping up. I'm all for
transparency, but I don't think airing value judgements would be a
beneficial for community development :) Questions or comments
involving evaluation criteria and process are fine.

Andrew