[Osmf-talk] FLOSS tools for the Scholarship Selection Process (WAS: Dorothea's hours for SotM WG)

[Michael Reichert]

Hi Mikel and other readers,

Am 23/12/2019 um 22.14 schrieb Mikel Maron, OSM:
> Right we have used google forms, that feeds into google sheets for the evaluation process. Yes we could use another system for form submission, but we would simply move them into sheets. Changing the form submission wouldn’t have any material effect on our current set up. The evaluation process is the key thing where we need to collaboratively score and evaluate. I’m not quite sure if the program tool would help here or not but it’s worth looking into. Open to other alternatives.Mikel

Do you mean "Sheets" as in "Google Docs Sheets" or Sheets as some kind
of online spreadsheet application, maybe hosted by a trustable company
or ourselves? There are FLOSS alternatives to Google Docs.

I was a member of the scholarship committee this year and give a bit
insight for the interested public and point out where which FLOSS tools
can be use.

The scholarship application and selection process in 2019 consisted of
the following steps:

1. Submission Form

This was implemented using a Google Form writing its results to a Google
Docs spreadsheet. This can easily be replaced by a simple web form and a
very basic backend application writing the results into a database or
CSV file. I don't know whether it is necessary to have any kind of spam
protection that is provided by reCAPTCHA in Google Forms.

2. Filtering

In order to reduce the number of about 500 submissions, I wrote a script
dropped applications without a valid OSM user name and without OSM
contributions (number of changesets fetched from the API). This could be
integrated in the submission form and serve as a spam protection.

3. Evaluation by a Committee

The results of the filtering script (a CSV file) was imported into
Google Docs. The reviewers were granted access to that table. The table
did not have user names. Reviewers were told to write their ratings into
a separate table with the following fields: reviewer ID, application ID,
score1, score2 (AFAIR there were two scores per review)

The simple solution is to host EtherCalc
(https://github.com/audreyt/ethercalc, used by FramaCalc
https://accueil.framacalc.org/en/). But there are two issues: First, our
sysadmins are overloaded and past Foundation boards have ignored or
avoided to address that issue [1]. Second, using a spreadsheet is not
really nice as a user interface. Something like a proper rating
application as used by the programme committee (they use Pretalx which
is designed for sessions) should be considered as a second step.

4. Selection

I was not involved in that part and cannot explain what happened.

Best regards

Michael



[1] Instead, working groups contract third parties for hosting services
as it happened with Pretalx.

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