Hi Siebrand, moving your feedback about process to the list.
On 05/06/2013 01:12 PM, Siebrand Mazeland (WMF) wrote:
Here is my ranking
(snip, thank you!)
I would like to provide some feedback, too: The whole process of GSoC was very confusing to me. Students communicated on melange, mediawiki.org http://mediawiki.org, and mailing lists. Some also emailed me and others privately. This scattered communication made me feel I was not able to properly inform myself of the feedback cycles a proposal went through. Melange not having any capabilities to show differences between versions of proposals, does not help - that's unfortunately not something we can directly information. I hope that the number of communication platforms for GSoC communication and documentation can be reduced in the next iteration, to make the process easier to follow to those that are supposed to comment on, evaluate and rank the proposals.
Yes, I agree. If it was confusing for you we can imagine how confusing it has been for many students. In the next iteration we will still have the same community channels + imperfect Google Melange, but we can do better at focusing the discussion
I was very able and willing to follow all of your instructions from the below email and the ones on linked page, until I truly understood what following them would mean for me time wise. If I understand your request well, you are basically asking us to read all proposals, take 15 criteria and all comments into account, and then rate all *subjects*, not the individual proposals. I estimate this is about a day of work to do well. I'm sorry, but this is too much effort for me with this short notice. I've done the best I can with the time available to me.
Mmm well, no. And I'm glad you invested maybe 1 hour instead of one day.
Saying "the project I mentor should go first!" is easy. I'm asking mentors to tell what proposals they think should be considered before the ones they are willing to mentor. We have a pool of 38 smart people directly involved in Wikimdia GSoC mentoring and I believe your personal rankings will answer directly most of the questions.
Of course you could spend a whole day assessing each proposal in detail. I believe you can go through the list pretty fast through, double-checking a few proposals that sound interesting but you are not familiar with. This quicker method has more room for personal mistakes, but if there are 37 other people playing the game I bet the consolidated list cannot go too wrong.
Thank you for the participation and the feedback! We are trying many things here as we go.