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As we come to the end of another successful admissions period, I thought it might be helpful to future applicants to discuss my thoughts on this latest admissions period. Before getting started on the nitty gritty of it all, I just wanted to say I am very happy with the quality and scope of our newest members. We admitted approximately the number we set out to admit (10-15). I look forward to helping these new members settle in to our community, and I am even more excited to see what they are able to accomplish with our services.

We have nearly completed reviewing all the hosting requests from this last new member admissions period. We received about 130 requests; more than I expected. Unfortunately nearly half of those were incomplete, and therefore not considered (though these people are free to log in in the future and complete their applications). Another 40 or so gave such short responses that they were denied without close review. Among both the incomplete and short applications there were several that looked interesting so it was disappointing that the applicants did not spend the time necessary to submit a quality request. Our new admissions system allowed users to save their progress and come back later, so I was surprised that so many people did not take advantage of this feature to give their responses deeper thought.

We were left with 27 requests that the admissions committee carefully read and discussed. We have admitted 11 new members, and we are waiting for responses to follow up questions by one applicant.

My thoughts from the previous post remain the same. Most of those who were admitted gave long, well-thought-out, complete responses to all the questions asked – principal among them, the question regarding site concept.  We are a charitable organization whose mission focuses on serving other charities, the arts, education, and the open source community. The applicants we admitted served one of these areas either directly, or in a clearly articulated indirect manner.

We will take a few weeks to give our new members time to settle in before reopening the admissions system. Those whose requests were denied are free to reapply in the future, but be sure to address the issues discussed in this and my previous blog post, as well as any notes we may have made in your denial email. Incomplete applications can be completed and submitted once we reopen.

We offer RSS feeds here as well as via twitter, but probably the best way to be informed of when we reopen would be to use the email subscription option here on our blog.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 22nd, 2009 at 10:30 am and is filed under New Member Requests, Prospective member advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.