Topics of concern:
- pre-applying?
- qualifying contributors by preliminary work
- identifying match of students to proposed projects
- useful and useless success indicators?
- students who disappear. no-shows?
- too many / too few students?
- "novice" (1st-year) vs "expert" (2nd-year) orgs
- outside interns?
- triage vs followup vs pre-specifying!!
- private vs public
- pre-specification. Too much content bad? Push students
- to creative proposals? List problems instead of solutions.
- Have proposal formatting and content standards
- project scoping
- good applications != good projects
- interview process?
- repeat students? select for or avoid?
- communications
- student to mentor (expectations)
- mentor to student (guidelines for eval)
- mentor to mentor
Slides: (please attach)
Proposed best practices-internal:
- All project recommendations:
- Start Early (Now, Jan?)
- Organize review board in advance
- start way early on every phase of selection process
- Google: Announce schedule projects earlier
- Get outside recommendations
- Consider organization's and applicant pool's capabilities
- Do not overspecify specific projects
- Prioritize creative (but doable) applications
- Ask students to reapply away from overloaded projects
- Limit number of applications per student
- Google: Link each application to other applications by same student in current and previous years
- Have an initial triage phase (duh)
- Have applications reviewed by topic-familiar reviews *and* generally-knowledgable ones
- Mentor discussion (duh)
- Have a defined process
- Avoid non-communicative students; set communications expectations
- Triage aggressively; apply effort to evaluation appropriate to merit
- Triage public -- is that even allowed?
- Be tolerant of language difficulties
- Request missing information in applications as early as possible
- Explicitly list things that would be application pluses or requirements: code, experience, originality, patches
- Re-scope projects during application process
- Google: Notification of updates to the applications. Improved communications tools -- specifically email to students when comments were added. Email to mentors when applications are updated.
- Google: Students need standard way (say html) to do enhanced applications -- some of the best applications had very sophisticated content. This would help the triage process.
Possible best practices:
- Select students, not projects?
- Require prior participation?
- Google: "Draft" or otherwise formally organize competition?
- Give a challenge problem to top applicants?