Student Proposal Period

Student proposals will begin to appear in the Proposals Submitted to my orgs section of My Dashboard as they apply.   

Student proposal and acceptance workflow 

 In brief (in Melange):

1. Each Student fills out and submits one or more proposals to an organization.
2. Mentors review and score proposals, making private comments for themselves and/or public comments for the student.
3. Mentors and Organization Administrators decide how many students they want to accept.
4. Organization Administrators indicate the minimum and maximum number of "slots" they desire for their Mentoring Organization.
5. The number of slots allocated to the organization is announced by Program Administrators.
6. Mentors and Organization Administrators decide which students to accept.
7. Organization Administrators accept Students using the slider on each application.
8. Organization Administrators assign a mentor to each Student, if one has not already been assigned.
9. Students are accepted/rejected and receive an email.

How do I review student proposals?

To review student proposals for your organization, click on Proposals submitted to my orgs on My Dashboard. This lists all the proposals submitted to all the organizations for which you are a Mentor or Organization Administrator. You can then visit each proposal individually by clicking on the corresponding item in the list.

The proposal page also provides a way to score the proposal and to view or create comments.

Melange is purposefully customized since we know that Organization Administrators all administer their proposal process differently.  You can view the Students' proposals based on one of a few statuses listed below:

 

Do not use the "Valid," "Invalid," or "Needs attention," states. Do use "Duplicate," "Accepted," "Rejected," and "No Mentor Assigned." If there is no Mentor assigned the proposal is still "Valid." The proposal will be in the "Needs attention" state if it has no mentor assigned or is a Duplicate. "Invalid" proposals are those that have been withdrawn by the Student or marked as "Ignored" on the proposal. The "Accepted" and "Rejected" statuses will only appear after the Student acceptance/rejection deadline. Students' proposals will not appear in the "Accepted" or "Rejected" state during the proposal review period. 

Can we customize Melange for our organization's workflow? 

There are several ways to customize the Melange workflow for your organization, all of which can be found on your organization profile, accessible from the Edit link on your organization homepage. Customizations include:

• Disabling scoring 
• Altering the scoring system to more or fewer stars

• Listing all Mentors while assigning Mentors to proposals

• The message to display when someone requests to be a Mentor or Organization Administrator of your organization

• The message that is included in the email sent to accepted and rejected students

• Extra fields that you can use to store arbitrary data on student proposals

• Adding a 'sub-organization' column to each proposal by clicking on Edit on your organization homepage. After adding the column you can edit its value in the Proposals submitted to my organizations page, accessible from My Dashboard.

Comments on Proposals

Mentors and Organization Administrators may post comments to any proposal. Proposal review comments are of two different types: public comments that are visible to the Student, the Mentors and the Organization Administrator, and private comments that are not visible to the Student.

Private comments are the default. If you'd like to make a public comment, uncheck the "Private" checkbox. Not only will the comment be visible to the Student, she will also receive email notification that you have commented on the application (provided she has remained subscribed to notifications on her proposal).

All comments are color coded to make it easy to distinguish between private (gray background) and public (light blue) comments on an application. Students may add comments to their application at any time, and these will be listed in the public comments section of the proposal review page.

Scoring Proposals

If you choose for your organization you can assign a score to a proposal by using a star-based review system. You may customize the number of stars available (the score range) from the organization profile. 

Each organization should decide on their own process for scoring proposals. Organizations do not need to use the scoring options in place in Melange if they choose not to. It does not affect student acceptance or rejection in any way.

This feature is meant to make it easier for organizations to make the final choice about which proposals they should accept if, for example, they end up in a duplicate situation with another organization and can't take their first choice Student.

Subscribing to proposal updates

If you wish to receive notifications about reviews on the proposals, check the box on the bottom of your Profile (via My Profile link on the left hand navigation bar) page labeled "Notify of new public comments" and "Notify of new private comments" depending on the comments for which you would like to receive updates. Once you check these fields you will receive notifications for all the comments of the given type for all the proposals submitted to all the organizations for which you are a Mentor or Organization Administrator.

How do I mark Student proposals as spam?

Proposals that are clearly spam, meaning proposals having no viable content, can be marked as ineligible by using the "Ignore Proposal" slide switch. Only Organization Administrators can perform this action. While deciding whether an proposal is spam is somewhat subjective, you will likely know a spam proposal when you see it. If you discover you have accidentally marked a proposal ineligible and you need to revert it, you can do so using the same sliding switch. Once you ignore the proposal you cannot assign a Mentor or accept that proposal and Mentors cannot use the "Wish to mentor" sliding switch. The Student cannot withdraw or edit this proposal. The Student's proposal will no longer appear in the Proposals submitted to my orgs list by default. You will need to change the Status column to display either "All" or "Invalid" proposals in order to see it again.

How do I assign a Mentor to a Student proposal?

Only Organization Administrators have the capacity to assign a particular Mentor to a proposal. They can do so by selecting the Mentor from the "Assign Mentor" drop down on the left hand "Proposal Actions" menu and clicking on the "Assign" button. The Organization Administrator can change the assigned Mentor at any time by updating the "Assign Mentor" select list. She can also add multiple Mentors to the proposal by clicking on the "Add Mentors" link below the Mentors select list on the proposal actions menu. 

Mentors appear in the Mentor drop-down list on a proposal only after they have toggled the "Wish to mentor" switch on the proposal to "yes." You cannot add a co-mentor to a Student proposal - co-Mentor designation must wait until the proposal has been converted to an active Student project. Your Mentors cannot see if they have been assigned to a Students' proposal until the announcement of accepted projects. 

You can let a Student edit her proposal after the proposal deadline by visiting My Dashboard -> Proposals submitted to my orgs -> Clicking on the name of the proposal you want to change in the list -> toggling the "Proposal Modifications" switch to "Enabled."

 

What is a Slot Allocation request?

After the Student proposal phase concludes, Organization's Administrators and Mentors review the proposals to decide which they would like to accept. The Organization Administrator then submits their minimum and maximum number of Students that they would like to accept into Google Summer of Code as a "slot allocation request" on their Organization Profile. 

The Program Administrators decide how many slots will be allocated to each organization soon after. Please be aware that it is usual for organizations to receive far fewer slots than requested.

If an organization chooses, slots can be traded to other organizations using the Slot Transfer actions, although the Program Administrators make the final decision on how slots are allocated.

 

Accepting or Rejecting Proposals

An Organization Administrator also has the ability to directly accept or reject the proposals for his organization, regardless of any scores given to the proposal. He/she can accept the proposal either by using the sliding switch on the proposal actions left hand menu or from the drop-down list of all the proposals. In other words, an organization may receive 2 slots and decide it wants to accept proposal "Space Elevator" and proposal "Thermal Detonator". The Organization Administrator may visit the applications for "Space Elevator" and "Thermal Detonator" and accept them, meaning these 2 proposals will then be the accepted as the projects for their organization no matter what the proposal review scores are. The top N ranked proposals that are marked "Accepted", where N is the number of student slots Google allocates to each organization, will be those that are accepted into the program.

The Organization Administrator should enter the acceptance and rejection messages into the Organization's Profile before the Student proposal phase concludes (see the timeline on the program homepage for exact date and time). 

To do this: 

1. go to My DashBoard -> My organizations 
2. Select the Organization from the list
3. Select "Edit"
4. Scroll down to find the Edit Fields.  

The format of this message consists of a standard message from the Program Administrator, followed by your message, which is in turn followed by a signature. 

For clarity, the list of requirements an organization must meet to be able to accept a Student proposal:

1. You must have a number (at least "1") in the text field for "# desired slots" on your Organization profile.
2. Your organization must have been allocated slots by the Program Administrators. You will not be allowed to accept more students than you have slots allocated to you. 
3. You must have toggled the "Accept Proposal" switch on each student proposal you want to accept to "Yes" or marked the proposal as "accept" from the proposals list.
4. You must have a Mentor assigned to each proposal you want to accept.  

The Deduplication Process

Once Organization Administrators have marked their student proposals as either Accept or Reject, some Students may be desired by multiple Mentoring Organizations. However, Students may only work on one project and within one Mentoring Organization each year. Information about students who have had proposals accepted by multiple organizations is later made visible to all Organization Administrators on their Proposals submitted to my orgs list. Organization Administrators will be notified via email of Student duplication to be resolved. 

 

You will be able to see if you are in a duplicate situation with another organization after the Program Administrators have made that information visible. You are encouraged to contact the organizations with whom you are in a duplicate situation and resolve it directly with them using the other organizations' contact information as listed on the proposal.

However, because some duplicates cannot be resolved between the organizations, the Program Administrators will set up a live IRC meeting where Organization Administrators can resolve these conflicts in real time. 

Do I have to work in Melange? 

Yes. Everyone participating is required to work within Melange as part of participating in Google Summer of Code. 

Can I sort student projects by tags?

No.