[Soc2006] Welcome!

[Ian Bicking]

A.M. Kuchling wrote:
> 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.

It was quite hard that year, since there were lots of dups, no comments, 
and no opportunity for feedback.  I think it will be much more 
straight-forward this year.

I think this year it will be clear that some proposals will have floated 
to the top, and then we can discuss those more directly (anything +2 or 
better?).  Because early submitters are more likely to get higher scores 
I don't think we should put too much weight on the scores.

It would probably be good to have a private mentors list after 
everything is submitted, so we can discuss specifics.  For instance, if 
there's two submissions on the same topic and they are both unlikely to 
get accepted, it's better to just discuss the specific case than to 
comment on them each in isolation.  We also have to figure out the 
mentor assignment; the choice of projects should take into account both 
the quality of the proposal (including references and whatnot), and the 
interest of a mentor.  OTOH, it would be nice if we encounter a good 
proposal that is missing a mentor, that we try to dig a mentor up 
somewhere; not that every good proposal will get accepted, but there 
will likely be a case where there will be a proposal we'd all really 
like to accept but no one feels capable of mentoring.  We would need to 
identify those early in order to actually find a mentor, though.

After that we have to figure out mentoring itself.  There's probably 
more to talk about there, but I'd like to suggest that each project get 
a co-mentor (who might also be a mentor for another project, kind of a 
buddy system).  Then mentors will have someone on their case about doing 
mentoring; last year many mentors (including myself) didn't feel they 
were involved enough in the project and monitoring their student's work, 
and this might be a way for us to encourage each other to do better.


-- 
Ian Bicking  /  ianb at colorstudy.com  /  http://blog.ianbicking.org