[SoC] Commenting on Applications

[Paul Kelly]

Hello Wolf,
[Quick introduction to me for the list: Paul Kelly, originally from
Northern Ireland, background in Electronic Engineering and been
contributing to GRASS for about 6 years now - no longer use GIS software
in my daily work but GRASS is an interesting enough project that I keep
coming back to it...]

On Fri, 28 Mar 2008, Wolf Bergenheim wrote:

> Hello fellow mentors,
>
> Since the time is short for the students to apply, it is important that we 
> give the students feedback so that they can alter their application. That way 
> we will get better applications and have a greater probability of having 
> successful SoC projects. The students can only modify their applications 
> until Mon, March 31st 12:00 PST. So comment early, please!

I worried last year that I may have been a little harsh in some of 
my comments on the applications. From my point of view I would want to 
mentor students that weren't lazy and were willing to use their initiative 
to go off and research things themselves after being given a little hint, 
rather than constantly asking questions. I see the initial comment / 
feedback process as an excellent way to gauge this. (I also got a little 
confused as to which comments were for the students to read and which only 
for the fellow mentors, but I see that has now been made clearer on the 
SoC site this year.)

I'm concerned slightly that there may be a conflict of interest between 
trying to get as many students accepted as we can at this stage and keep 
them on board, and trying to determine which students are good and 
definitely worth chasing after. My attitude is definitely the latter; I 
don't want to end up mentoring a student who is lazy or hasn't got a good 
grasp of the task. I hope this sounds reasonable?
Hopefully it won't be overly relevant though. The one GRASS-related 
application I've seen so far is very good and I'm very impressed with it.

I also felt last year there was a bit of an inconsistency in the scores 
given between different mentors and different organisations - do we have 
any OSGeo-specific guidelines for this?

Best regards,

Paul