Today Gabor asked me on IRC how the TPF Grant Committee (GC) votes on the submitted grants. As this might be of interest to the general public, I reworked my reply and post it here:
Each quarter, the GC head^wsecretary (currently Alberto Simões) sends out a call for proposals and collects the results. He later posts them to the TPF blog for review by the community.
You now have the chance to read and discuss the proposals for approximately two weeks. As the members of the GC do not know every aspect of Perl, we are very happy for any feedback posted to the TPF blog, be it a simple "great proposal" or a detailed critique why the proposal is utterly useless and completely sucks. This process also gives the author of the proposal the chance to comment on questions raised by the community or GC members.
A few days before the voting deadline, the secretary sends out an email containing a list of all grants to the GC members (via the GC mailing list). Now every member gets to vote according to this rules:
After the deadline, the secretary weeds out rejected proposal (Rules of Operation 5. "Grant votes require a majority of the cast votes to be in favor of the proposal being voted on.") and sorts them by the total number of vote points each proposal got (using some mighty Perl script, I presume).
This results in sorted list of grant proposals, ordered by the combined vote of the GC members. Beginning from the top of the list, proposals are declared accepted by the TPF (i.e. this is not the GC's job anymore), until the budget set aside by TPF for this quarter is used up. Proposals that would be accepted, but could not be funded are listed as such, so that other sponsors might step in and fund them. See the results of the 2008 Q3 Grants for an example.
All proposals that did not get funded might be resubmitted in the next quarter.
If you have any suggestions on how to improve this process, feel free to comment here or on the TPF blog.
