[Haskell-cafe] [haskell.org Google Summer of Code 2013] Approved Projects

[Edward Kmett]

Hi Dominic,

The proposal is admittedly rather unfortunately opaque.

The parts I can shed light on:

Students come up with proposals with the help of the community and then
submit them to google-melange.com.

A bunch of folks from the haskell community sign up as potential mentors,
vote on and discuss the proposals. (We had ~25 candidate mentors and ~20
proposals this year).

The student application template contains a number of desirable criteria
for a successful summer of code application, which is shown on the
google-melange website under our organization -- an old version is
available http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/summer-of-code/wiki/StudApply2012contains

Once we have the proposals in hand, and some initial ranking, we ask google
for slots. Allocation is based on past performance, arcane community
parameters that only they know, mentor ratio, etc. This should be our
largest year in the program, despite the fact that in general organizations
have been getting fewer slots as more organizations join, so we're
apparently doing rather well.

In general we do try to select projects that maximize the public good. Most
of the time this can almost be done by just straight cut off based on the
average score. There is some special casing for duplicate applications
between different students and where students have submitted multiple
applications we can have some flexibility in how to apply them.

This year we also received an extra couple of special-purpose darcs slots
from Google in exchange for continuing to act as an umbrella organization
over darcs at the request of the administrator of the program at Google. In
previous years I had requested an extra slot for them, this year the
request came in the other direction.

We do inevitably get more good proposals than we get slots. This year we
could have easily used another 3-4 slots to good effect.

The main part I can't shed light on:

Google requests that the final vote tallies remain private. This is done so
that students who put in proposals to a high volume orgs and don't get
accepted, or who are new to the process and don't quite catch all the
rules, don't wind up with any sort of publicly visible black mark. This
unfortunately means, that we can't really show the unaccepted proposals
with information about how to avoid getting your proposal rejected.

I hope that helps. If you have any more questions or if my answer didn't
suffice please feel free to follow up!

-Edward Kmett



On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 6:52 AM, Dominic Steinitz <dominic at steinitz.org>wrote:

> Hi Edward,
>
> Although the project I am interested in (as a user) has been accepted :-),
> I can't help feeling the selection process is a bit opaque. Is it
> documented somewhere and I just missed it? Apologies if I did.
>
> BTW I appreciate all the hard work that goes into the selection process.
>
> Dominic Steinitz
> dominic at steinitz.org
> http://idontgetoutmuch.wordpress.com
>
>
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