GSOC Next Steps: Evaluate and Select Students by April 17

[Ed Cable]

Hello Mentors,

Thank you for all the time you've taken to interact with and respond to students during the application period. I know it can be hectic at times but its during this process that we get the best chance to experience how the students will be as contributors in our community.

You should have received Carol's email to the mentors' list which details what's happening next. Below is some elaboration on that and next steps to be ready for. 

Remember - no public disclosure(or direct communications to student) of accepted status until April 21 - Google is strict on this. 

Student Acceptance and Slot Allocation

Between now and April 17 is when we have the opportunity to evaluate our student proposals. As Carol, notes the ranking system has no bearing on whether the students gets accepted - it's merely a tool for us to help internally manage the evaluation process.  This year I stole a page out of OpenMRS' book and moved from a 5pt to an 11pt scale. 11pts is reserved for those exceptional students and we are certain we'd be accepting.

Accepting a student in Melange is done by accepting the student and assigning a mentor. We can only accept as many students up to slots we get allocated. We get to put an ideal and an actual number we'd like to request but the discretion is up to Google in terms of how many slots we actually get. 

Realistically, we could take on 4 to 6 interns this year - do others feel the same? I hope that we can at least get 4 slot allocations. Last year we were originally only allocated 2 and then received 2 extra slots.  So we can get in the position where we have more students we'd like to accept than we have slots available which can become difficult especially if a student has only applied to our project. We get our initial slot allocations April 9. 

Major phases of the GSOC timeline are at: https://mifosforge.jira.com/wiki/display/RES/2014+Google+Summer+of+Code

Proposal Evaluations

We have a total of 19 proposals to review - this is fairly close to the number we had last year. I think the overall quality is fairly good and there are certainly several students that have already shown great potential. Here are the steps we'll follow to come to our final selections (which will

1. Please read and review the proposals on your own time.
1. You should be able to view them in Melange under My Dashboard.
2. Select a ranking if you'd like and make private comments as well. You can rejig your memory of each student from this spreadsheet - http://goo.gl/Nnxerb (to be updated). You can also jot down notes on each student in this Google Doc if you want more room: http://goo.gl/7Aq1nR
3. Bear in mind the overall quality of the student and not necessarily the project idea as we can put them on whatever project would be a best fit for the student/mentor and our product priorities. 
4. It should be clear which students spent time on their proposal and interacted with the community - we've used this level of interaction in the past as a key evaluation factor. 
5. We can also provide public comments to student and allow them to edit their application if we so choose. 
2. Proposal discussion meeting - Let's aim for a mentor-wide Skype call on Thursday March 27 at 1400GMT after the bi-weekly developer meeting. I've attached a calendar invite. 
1. Come to this meeting prepared with the students you'd like to shortlist for interviews and why. 
3. Conduct interviews with shortlisted candidate - March 31 through April 9
1. We'll only conduct Skype interviews with those candidates who make our first cut - for those exceptional students we'll use the interview to mainly establish their schedule is clear for the summer and their commitment to the project. For those candidates that aren't as strong on paper but we see potential, we'll try and explore their gaps and see if they have the skill and motivation to grow as an intern.
2. Interviews will be led by the mentors/backup mentors for that student/project. - We like to do a total of two interviews so we can get the perspective of at least two mentors.
4. Collectively we'll make the final call on which students based on our allocations. 

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Carol Smith <car...@google.com>
Date: Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 11:20 AM
Subject: [GSoC Mentors Announce] [GSoC 2014] Please Read: Welcome! And the month ahead for GSoC 2014.
To: GSoC Mentors Announce <gsoc-mento...@googlegroups.com>

Hi there,

Congratulations on almost getting through student proposal submissions! Welcome to GSoC 2014! We're looking forward to spending this program with you. 

This is an email that contains all the information your organization needs for the next month. Please read it thoroughly and follow the steps through to the end.

Step One: You have between now and 17 April to review and accept, ignore, and rank (if applicable) your student proposals. How you decide which proposals you accept is up to you. Keep in mind that ranking (the "star system" on the proposals) has no bearing on what students are accepted. Only students who you explicitly accept and assign a mentor to will be accepted. You can also accept students in bulk on the dashboard if you so choose.

Step Two: (Org Admins Only) By 24:00UTC on 7 April, please make sure your slot allocation request is accurate. Go to My Dashboard --> Managed Organizations, click on your organization. Click on the Preferences tab of your profile. You'll see two slot numbers on the page: "min" and "max." "Min" is your lower threshold - this is the number of slots you would need to accommodate your absolutely most amazing proposals. "Max" is your upper threshold - this is the number of slots you would love to have in an ideal world. You may also want to read the Notes on Allocations [1] document, particularly if you're a new org, to get a sense of how we do this process and what's rational to expect. If you do not fill in your slot allocation request by the deadline you will be allocated 1 slot for your org this year. 

Step Three: (Org Admins Only) I will announce slot allocations Wednesday, 9 April after the close of business pacific time. If you are happy with your slot allocation for this year, you can continue accepting and rejecting proposals until 17 April. If your org ends up with more slots than it has excellent proposals (or available mentors), you will be able to give back slots to the pool. To do this, you'll need to go to your Organization profile again and you will now be able to click on the "Slots Transfer" tab. Select how many slots you want to give away. Add a note to us if you'd like to give them to a particular org. We will approve each of these trades individually. Conversely, if your org ends up with not enough slots for all the proposals you want to accept this year, please email me directly I will make a note of it on our waiting list. You will be given more slots when and if some come back into the pool.

Step Four: (Org Admins Only) Please assign mentors to all the proposals you plan to accept (or even hope to accept) ASAP. **You will not be able to accept a proposal that does not have a mentor assigned even if you have the slots to accommodate the proposal and mark it as accepted.**

Step Five: (Org Admins Only) On 15 April I will run our first round of deduplication [2] checks. After that, if you are in a duplicate situation with another org, you will be able to see a list in red of the student proposals on the review proposal page that are in this situation. You will also see a way to contact the fellow org to work it out. We will have four days to try to resolve as many of these as we can. You may consult with the student about his/her preference on which org he/she would like to be accepted for, but you do not have to. We assume that students have not applied for any org they would not be willing to work with.

Step Six: The final point at which we can resolve these situations is in the Deduplication Meeting. You must attend this IRC meeting (in #gsoc on freenode) on Friday, 18 April at 19:00 UTC. Even if you are one of the lucky orgs to not have any duplicates with a fellow org immediately preceding the meeting, you are still required to have someone(s) attend the meeting who can make a decision on your behalf when and if our playing around with the system happens to put you in a duplicate situation. This IRC meeting is the last point at which student decisions can be made, so please know your preferences when you go into it. The decisions made in this meeting are final, and will be made by myself (arbitrarily) if neither organization can come to an agreement. **If no one is in the meeting to represent your org and we need input from you, the student will automatically go to the other org.**

Step Seven: (Org Admins Only)  Please make sure that you have looked over the welcome message your organization will be sending your accepted students as part of their acceptance email to make sure it's accurate. Go to My Dashboard --> Managed Organizations and click on the organization. Click on the Preferences tab. Scroll down to "Message to accepted students" on your profile and make sure it looks correct. Save the profile if you make any changes.

Step Eight: Please do not discuss acceptance or rejection with the students until I have announced it on Monday, 21 April.

Thanks for your help, everyone!

[1] - http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2014/studentallocations
[2] - For those of you who don't know, "duplication" means a student submitted proposals to multiple orgs and has been accepted by more than one of them. We have to resolve all these duplicate issues before we announce accepted students on 21 April.

Cheers,
Carol

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Ed Cable

Mifos Community Manager

Director of Community Programs, Mifos Initiative

edc...@mifos.org | Skype: edcable | Mobile: 484.477.8649

Collectively Creating a World of 3 Billion Maries | http://openmf.org  

Note: As of Jan 1, 2014 my email has changed from edcable@openmf.org to edcable@mifos.org. Please update your address book accordingly.

[Ed Cable]

Hi all,

Somehow the calendar invitation disappeared so I'm re-sending to each of you individually the invite. Please let me know if you'll be able to attend the meeting this Thursday at 1400GMT.

Re: GSOC Next Steps: Evaluate and Select Students by April 17 When Thu, March 27, 7am – 8am GMT-07:00 Where Skype Who • Ed Cable • mifos-gsoc-mentors • Michael Vorburger • Sander van der Heyden • Binny Gopinath • Nayan Ambali • Kojo Gambrah • James Dailey • Anuruddha Premalal • Vishwas Babu

Thanks,

Ed

[Ed Cable]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Vishwas Babu <vis...@confluxtechnologies.com>
Date: Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 5:56 AM
Subject: Re: GSOC Next Steps: Evaluate and Select Students by April 17
To: Ed Cable <edc...@mifos.org>

Ed,

Madhukar and I were working on some broken functionality and I am going to bed now so will not be able to make it to the Mentors call. I am sending across the list of students I would suggest be interviewed (1 and 2 stand out and everybody else is 3 or 4/5)

Note that I have not gone through all the proposals and am only recommending the students who have made/or are working on pull requests

1) Ishaan: Definite yes from me even before the interview (has made a pull request to the platform along with the mobile poc)

2) Gaurav Saini: Yes because of the amount of work he has put in (however does not seem to have any java skills so we need to be sure we have a UI project)

===Folks who have made pull requests with code (In order of fix complexity)======

3) Andras Toth: Made two pull requests to the Community app (one of medium complexity and another a very trivial one) and seems to be familiar with Front end development

3) Rishab Shukla: Made a pull request to the community app ( of low-medium complexity), he was struck on an issue and was able to reach out on stack overflow and the maintainers of the js library he was trying to integrate and sort out the issue (which is a good thing)

3) Channa Somathilaka: Made a platform pull request (of a low-medium complexity functionality)

3) Antonio Carella : Made a community app pull request (trivial complexity so hard to gauge coding skills). Communicates very effectively (rating him higher than Marius solely based on his communication skills)

3) Marius Rabenarivo: Made a platform pull request (low complexity)

===folks who are working on issues ======

4) Buddhika: Sent pull request to the community app (only spelling mistake fixes, so have no idea of his coding skills)

However, he is working on an platform and UI issue and does hope to send across a pull request soon

===folks who have made pull requests without actual code======

5) Pawan Dubey: Made a platform documentation pull request (only documentation, so have no idea if he can code or not)

Asked a lot of questions but didn't make any pull request with actual code in them which is red flag for me. On the other hand I gave him a hard time before accepting his pull request (repeated rejections till the pull request had a single commit) so he does follow up

Regards,

Vishwas

[Ed Cable]

Hi all,

A reminder for our homework from today's meeting.

1. By Saturday morning (local time), review proposals and add private comments and ranking. 
   
2. Email me your availability window for Skype interviews between 3/31 and 4/9

Notes from today's meeting at: http://goo.gl/qr5iW7

Ed

[Nayan Ambali]

Hi Ed,

Is there guidelines or document to follow for deriving/calculate scoring for the student? Or is it just based the proposals and interactions with community and submitted code.

Thanks

Nayan Ambali

--

Thanks and Regards,
Nayan Ambali 

Mob : +91 9591996042.

[Ed Cable]

Nayan,

Based on the proposals, interactions, and submitted code. No hard-and-fast guidelines just operate with the lens of finding interns that:

• Will be able to add value to the community throughout the summer but more importantly has the commitment and potential to become a long-term contributor to the project. 
• We want students who are already strong but even if they're not that advanced right now they've shown the willingness to learn and the capacity to grow through strong communication, asking good questions, independent initiative, ability to listen to and constructively take advice.
• They should also be a good team player so in this time demonstrate how they'll support fellow community members, how they're open and transparent with their communication, and how willing they are to ask for help.  
• Lastly want to make sure they have the summer open with this as their full-time commitment.
  

[Nayan Ambali]

Hi Vishwas,

Looks like Andras Toth has not applied for Mifos, I did not find his proposal.

Thanks

Nayan Ambali

Thanks and Regards,
Nayan Ambali

+91 9591996042

skype: nayangambali

[Vishwas Babu]

>>Looks like Andras Toth has not applied for Mifos, I did not find his proposal.

Bummer..

Regards,

Vishwas