Date: Sat, 21 Mar 2015 13:20:45 -0700 From: Colin Percival <cperciva@freebsd.org> To: Royce Williams <royce@tycho.org> Cc: Eitan Adler <lists@eitanadler.com>, "freebsd-chat@freebsd.org" <freebsd-chat@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: higher education scholarships for open source or BSD? Message-ID: <550DD29D.70106@freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <CA%2BE3k92-CkGdbAu1tVZJB_YEgdfy1q6sJt7oATL7nNqq21_ykg@mail.gmail.com> References: <alpine.NEB.2.02.1503201245500.22177@t1.m.reedmedia.net> <CAF6rxgkH8uT4%2Bpyc1GhqaQy483oSn5WdoAJ0ggAZKcrt=oM_-Q@mail.gmail.com> <550D29CD.5030703@freebsd.org> <CA%2BE3k92-CkGdbAu1tVZJB_YEgdfy1q6sJt7oATL7nNqq21_ykg@mail.gmail.com>
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On 03/21/15 06:39, Royce Williams wrote: > Could you redact anything sensitive, and post your entire terms of > reference? Perhaps as a link from the original page? Nothing sensitive; the terms of reference for all awards are available via the university website. Quoted text is the ToR, the rest is my commentary on what it means and why it's there. > The Open Source Software Engagement Award > One award, valued at a minimum of $1,000, will be granted annually in any term to an undergraduate student who meets the following criteria: Most "service" awards at SFU are $1000, so I went with the same amount. Depending on the pool of applicants, I might give more money and have this changed to "Two awards... to students of different genders" since (unlike most of the university, where women are in the majority and receive an even larger majority of awards) there is a distinct lack of women in OSS; on the other hand, I don't want to create an award which zero or one people would be eligible for each year. > is enrolled full-time in a Bachelor’s degree program; > is in good academic standing; and Boilerplate requirements for undergraduate awards. I decided to limit this to undergrads because (a) most service awards are, and (b) it's hard to compare contributions made by undergrads vs. grad students. > has demonstrated excellence in contributing to an Open Source Software project(s) on a volunteer basis, consisting of code and/or documentation. "demonstrated excellence" is mostly boilerplate text; it provides flexibility to the committee if students apply who have made OSS contributions but they are all so trivial as to be not deserving of recognition. "contributing ... on a volunteer basis" is because I didn't want to simply give an extra $1000 to students who were getting $5k from GSoC or even more from summer co-op jobs. "code and/or documentation" is because I wanted to clarify that, unlike Google, I think documentation is a perfectly worthy contribution. > Preference will be given to students who have taken a leadership role within a project. In the language of terms of reference at SFU, "preference will be given" means "the committee will look for students who satisfy this criterion, and if any do then students who don't satisfy the this criterion won't be considered". The words "leadership role within a project" are inherently vague, but cover my feeling that students who "wear hats" (in FreeBSD-speak) are more worthy of recognition than those who merely write code; herding cats is hard work. > Applications must include: > a list of contributions to the Open Source Software project(s); and, Obviously, the committee needs to know what they're recognizing. > a letter of reference from another project member describing the project and the applicant’s contributions. This requirement implicitly but very deliberately excludes one-person open source projects. I did this because (a) I think a lot of the value of open source software comes from its nature as a social endeavour, and (b) there are a huge number of crappy one-person "open source projects" out there -- in a way, "has anyone else joined the project" is a filter for quality. Letters of reference are also a large part of how applications for awards are typically evaluated. When I proposed this the university suggested that it should be "from a supervisor", but I didn't think that would really work given the often non-hierarchical nature of open source projects... > The award will be granted by the Senate Undergraduate Awards Adjudication Committee. This is the standard boilerplate text to indicate that this award goes to the main university-wide committee to adjudicate. It was suggested to me that this award could be handled within the department of computer science, and it's possible that we'll amend the terms of reference to that effect in the future if SUAAC has too much difficulty evaluating OSS contributions (I doubt humanities professors will know much about code, but they should still be able to make a judgment based on the letter of reference); but I find that a lot of good OSS contributions come from non-CS students, and awards which are adjudicated within an individual department tend to only be advertised to that department's students. -- Colin Percival Security Officer Emeritus, FreeBSD | The power to serve Founder, Tarsnap | www.tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid
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