Re: [boost] [GSoC 2014] Boost.Fixed-Point Proposal

Subject: Re: [boost] [GSoC 2014] Boost.Fixed-Point Proposal
From: Niall Douglas (s_sourceforge_at_[hidden])
Date: 2014-03-22 13:18:23

On 21 Mar 2014 at 13:29, Stefan Seefeld wrote:

> > Be aware that I plan to ask this community to rank the proposals this 
> > Sunday 23rd. Between submission deadline tomorrow 21st and Sunday I 
> > hope to get all the potential mentors to indicate which proposals 
> > they like on Melange as this may aid the community when ranking.
> 
> I think the schedule you propose is too aggressive. There are quite a
> few proposals to be reviewed, so I don't think you can expect anyone to
> do this carefully within two days. Also, I expect this to be an
> iterative process, with changes applied incrementally following comments
> gathered from mentors as well as this list.

I only wish people were so thorough! What you'll find is that people 
only bother glancing over the top fifteen or so ranked applications 
and simply reinforce the existing rankings. Even already, with just 
the mentors voting, you can clearly see people simply don't bother 
voting for the lowest ranked proposals - just me and one other has 
voted on everything.

This phenonomen is well known to the social sciences - basically, the 
first reviewers (i.e. the mentors) have an outsize effect on the 
eventual ranking, and it's a Zipf's Law power rule proportion.

In other words, what I'm saying is that 80% of the ranking has 
already happened. You'll find any improvements in the proposals no 
longer have much effect. Hence I had considered there no point in 
waiting, especially as we have to figure out what to do about the 
mentors with four very strong proposals attached to them.

Niall

--- 
Boost C++ Libraries Google Summer of Code 2014 admin
https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/wiki/SoC2014