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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




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