Re: 2009 acceptance

[Karl Berry]

Sadrul, thanks for bringing this up.

    Leaving public and/or private comments is absolutely encouraged.

Yes.

I strongly encourage all GNU mentors to review as many GNU SoC
application as you have time for (and knowledge of).  The more people
who look at a given application, the more likely problems will be
identified, etc.

Each application should belong to a known GNU package, and the people
who volunteered to mentor that package should take the lead in
communicating with the student.  It is certainly not forbidden for
others to leave public comments -- just use your discretion. And
regardless, it is good for anyone and everyone to look at and review
applications.  (In cases where students are submitting blind, without a
known mentor, James, Micah, or I will try to find someone or otherwise
deal with.)

    Last year, there were also many mentors that would score proposals that
    were not related to their projects, and apparently that had been
    previous practice

Yes, that's true.  I'm not sure; getting rankings from the non-mentors
can help guide us in finding the best final proposals.  Discretion is
again surely encouraged, though.

    This was all the more troublesome when one could only
    score up/down by increments of 2, requiring a massive clickfest :\

Yes, that was exceedingly annoying, but at least it is only a pain for
at the end.  It's good to get information as we go along.

For those who are new this year: the precise numerical rankings as we go
along are not that important.  They are just a general guide to our
sorting.  When applications are closed and we are making the final
decisions, we will adjust the scores so that the ones we want get
selected, however easy or painful that turns out to be.

THanks,
Karl

P.S. Is there anyone with Google account "avd" here who asked to be a
mentor?  There's a request in the app, but I have no way of knowing who
it is or how to contact them.  As far as I can see, anyway.