[Kde-games-devel] Scoring/Ranking Student Applications

[Mauricio Piacentini]

Hi, people. Regarding scoring: for the past 3 years no proposal from 
kdegames got selected, while at the same time we had multiple 
acceptances for other areas of KDE. I had not participated in the mentor 
process, and as I understood it this happened because we (kdegames) did 
not have pre-reserved slots, or something like that.
So I want to make sure this year we (games and also edu) are on board. I 
find that most of the kdegames community still does not know exactly 
what we have to do. I posted about this last month to let us prepare for 
it (see the archives), but the process was not defined at that time.
The message posted yesterday by Jeff explains the process but it is 
still not clear to me, certainly because I do not know how gsoc works, 
so please help me here, so things are clear and I can write a short 
message to kdegames-devel outlining the process:

Who are the mentors that will vote? How many, and from which areas of 
KDE? Jeff mentioned:

--
April 3rd 19:00 UTC: When the student application period closes, and not
before, we will begin the scoring process.  Each mentor is allowed to
score each application, but ONLY +1 or -1.  Please do not assign any
other score to a proposal; likewise do not vote more than once on a
proposal (if anyone sees these rules not being followed, please report
it to the admins).
--

So, should I ask the kdegames developers to sign up as mentors so we 
could have a say on what gets selected or not? Up until now I think only 
Stefan is signed, but I might be wrong.

If this is how it works, I think it tends to bias slots to the 
"subproject" that has more mentors signed, and tends to create division 
and competition inside KDE. The whole concept of subproject is also 
somehow artificial. Why in some cases an application is considered a 
project, and in others a module of 25 applications gets the same 
treatment? Last year for example we had 6 Amarok projects awarded. I 
understand the importance and strength of the Amarok community, but I 
would like to avoid something like this happening again while other 
areas get zero slots, as it brings feelings of unfair sharing of 
resources to the KDE community as a whole.

Let me be 100% clear here: I know this was not made on purpose to "rig" 
anything, and the admins here are volunteering to help conduct the 
project as fairly as possible. But organizing this is a lot of work, and 
sometimes the communication is not arriving clear at the other end. This 
is my humble attempt to communicate clearly to the kdegames community 
what we have to do to get on board, so if it happens again that no 
project from kdegames is selected for lack of mentors then the fault is 
entirely from us.

Best regards,
Mauricio Piacentini