Template:Selection Process for Outreach Programs

1. Seek long-term contributors, not just new features. It probably takes more time to mentor a project than to complete it yourself.
2. Choose the best candidate, not the one that arrived first.
3. Don't choose a candidate based only on a convincing proposal and past experiences. They must complete our recommended program guidelines.
4. Be transparent in your communications with contributors and treat them all fairly.
5. Don't share any information about final results with your candidates before the official announcements. This also means:
   • Do not assign a specific Phabricator project, or its dependencies to any potential candidates before the official announcement.
   • Don't make up your mind on a candidate before the submission deadline. Allow all potential candidates to submit proposals for the project until the official deadline.
6. Do not share a single project idea between two candidates. Try breaking it up into individual non-overlapping modules for better evaluation of individual efforts.
7. Look for feedback and endorsements on the proposal from the community members
8. It's recommended to interview your candidate via an online medium.
9. Ensure that participant would be able to put the number of hours as expected of them from the outreach program.
10. Score your mentee and report to the organization admins. You could use the system below to rank them on a 1-5 scale (adapted from the Outreachy program):
    • 5 = amazing applicant, could become a maintainer on completing the program, made extensive contributions of high quality
    • 4 = strong applicant, will certainly do a good job, made substantial contributions of high quality (> ~50 lines of code or equivalent)
    • 3 = good applicant, but is somewhat inexperienced
    • 2 = is unlikely to do a good job
    • 1 = not a good candidate
    • Additional free software experience indicator(s)
      • + = enthusiast based on past actions (e.g. has a blog, has been to conferences, has an active GitHub account, or contributed to free software for some time)
      • 0 = proficient user of free software
      • - = no experience or very new to free software
11. In case of a GSOC/Outreachy overlap -- consider a female GSoC applicant for Outreachy only if they are best or only candidate for a project that is not receiving a GSOC slot.
12. If two applicants are ranked equally based on their contributions during the application phase, only then, consider their prior contributions to make a final decision. We strongly discourage giving priority to someone with prior contributions and fewer during the application phase over another candidate with more contributions during the application phase.