Quick note: These rules have been updated for 2021. Previous criteria are here: 2018, 2019 and 2020.

Criteria

Once proposals have been finalised, applicant proposals will be graded based on the following criteria:

Project and Plan

  • Does it solve the problem we need solving? Does applicant clearly identify the problem?
  • Does it offer a sensible solution?
  • Does it offer supporting evidence for technologies chosen, e.g. bootstrap. Sometimes a compare/contrast of different technologies considered can be helpful.
  • Does the proposal have a realistic timeline, and are deliverables correct and timely?
  • Does the applicant have enough time in the week to carry our their plan? (30+ hours)
  • Bonus for “what if things go wrong planning”, e.g. bonus features towards the end of the plan that can be removed if/when the bugs strike.
  • Nice bonus features in addition to the main project = good, ONLY unrelated ‘bonus’ features = bad.

Team working skills

  • Can the applicant carry out tasks on their own over a 1.5 month period?
  • Clear evidence of communication skills
    • Lower points for gross overcommunication (“what should I name this variable?”), better if they quietly and competently get the job done but interact at appropriate times, e.g. InterMine bugs, sensible progress reports.
  • Is the applicant capable of following existing guidelines and instructions where appropriate?
  • Does the applicant’s behaviour suggest potential mentorship skills in the longer term?

Skills and Experience

It’s important for us to see some of the following in the application:

  • Does the applicant have reasonable evidence they’ve competently done something relevant to this before? e.g. one or more of
    • a GitHub profile,
    • pull requests on InterMine’s repos
    • published applications
    • code from a uni assignment?
  • Note: we for GSoC don’t require a PR to an InterMine project. It’s handy as a source of evidence, but any of the others should do just fine. For Outreachy, at least one contribution is mandatory, but the contribution could also be something like an issue raised, documentation amended, mockups created, or contributing to a discussion topic.
  • Absolutely no work available - not even a published app, some work experience, or code from a class assignment, is a red flag.

Extras

Mentorship

Does the applicant have evidence of potential mentorship skills? This criterion is not required in order to be a successful applicant, but it may help us decide in the case of multiple well-qualified applicants, as we value interns and students who are able to return to our community and help to teach others in the longer term.

How the ranking process works

All applicants with a finalised proposal will have their proposals reviewed by one or more mentors in the organisation, and ranked out of 10 based on the criteria above. This score will also be averaged to provide a mean result. These scores are not the final acceptance criteria - so a 9.1 won’t automatically win over an 8.6 - but they do help provide general guidelines for the mentors who are choosing from a large body of qualified applicants.

Generally, we will try to ensure that each applicant has reviews from at least two mentors, especially in cases where there might be a conflict of interest (e.g. if a mentor knows one of the applicants or attended the same university or work place).

Accepted applicants

Applicants will be notified of their acceptance by Google/Outreachy when all accepted applicants are announced, and will not be notified of their internal grades. Please note that we usually have more highly qualified applicants than slots available for the organisation, so sometimes proposals that are genuinely very good have to be rejected. We genuinely wish we could take you all!