[Soc2006] Welcome!

[A.M. Kuchling]

On Mon, May 01, 2006 at 03:30:53PM -0700, Neal Norwitz wrote:
> It would be great to hear from people that worked on SoC this last
> year so we can do a better job this year.

You could look at the archives for the pysoc-mentors mailing list for
the gory details.  Last year there were 285 proposals submitted.  The
rough plan was:

* First pass: modify every proposal's score (+1 or -1) after looking
  at it.  This ensures that every proposal gets looked at once.  Score
  of 0 = unread.

* Second pass: +1 for reasonable, -1 for duplicates, copies of the wiki suggestions,
  or otherwise clearly bad.

* Third pass: mentors begin picking projects they feel able to mentor.
  I think this drove the final selection last year; some projects looked good 
  but no one felt able to mentor them.

* Fourth pass: rank mentored projects.  Google will presumably fund N projects, so we 
  should have the N top projects ready for them.

Various brave individuals (Ian Bicking, Brett Cannon, and especially
David Ascher) made their own triage passes over the flood of
applications.

The goal was to pick applications that looked exceptional, not to
think very hard about unacceptable or marginal proposals.

--amk