Mentors, We need to establish some guidelines for reviewing proposals. They won't be complicated :) I'm opting not to use the mentors mailing list for this announcement. I know that all the mentors are subscribed here. Here's how this should work: 1. Identify the set of proposals for projects that you are interested in mentoring. 2. Evaluate the proposal and write your evaluation as a PRIVATE comment. 3. If you have questions of the student, you can write PUBLIC comments or send them an email. 4. Rank the proposal (I think 5 is the best this year). That would be the project that you want to mentor. Towards the end of the review process, we will select the 10 best proposals. This doesn't guarantee that we'll *fund* 10 proposals, just that I've requested 10 slots. I would like, this year, if all students got feedback regarding their proposals even if they are clearly rejects. The reason for writing evaluations privately, for now, is that it will help me write a public summary for proposals that are not accepted. I'll figure out how this is going to work over the course of the week :) Specific evaluation criteria are up to you (the mentors). You may ask students to modify good proposals. You do not need to ask *all* students to improve their proposals. At the end of the week, you should have a list of 1 or 2 proposals that *you yourself* will mentor. If you are not offering to mentor the project, please don't review it as a 5. Otherwise, we end up with a case where we have to assign a mentor to a project that they aren't interested in. I don't think that this has worked out very well in the past. Also, would prefer that comments regarding specific proposals not be sent to the list. I don't think it would be a good idea for a flood of "this proposal is AWFUL" emails to start popping up. I'm all for transparency, but I don't think airing value judgements would be a beneficial for community development :) Questions or comments involving evaluation criteria and process are fine. Andrew