Finishing up SoME3

Hey folks,

This year we ran the third iteration of the Summer of Math Exposition. For any unfamiliar, see the winner announcements in 2021 and 2022. Above you'll find a draft for the announcement this year, and please do let me know if you spot any issues or errors (for example, in the end, I swap two syllables in pronouncing "Crozatier".  Doh!)

Aside from announcing it and inviting people to join, I haven't written many posts about SoME3, but since this spring a lot has been quietly whirring away in the background to make the contest possible.  This ranges from the creation of a new website that we used for the peer review process, thanks primarily to Frédéric Crozatier, to the activity among participants and curious onlookers in the Discord, with many thanks to James Schloss and other moderators there for the community management.

I spent more of my month of September than I care to admit looking over many of the entries and combining my own notes with the feedback of about a dozen other trusted guest judges to decide on a set of 5 winners and 20 honorable mentions. This is ultimately an impossible task because there is no such thing as an objective metric making one piece of content better than another. No entry was flawless, but the virtues and flaws of a given pair of videos rarely fall on the same axes in the many-dimensional space characterizing a piece's quality. Most pertinently, when the target audiences are very different, the question of which is better is legitimately ill-posed without specifying "better for whom?". 

Still, in the hopes of doing right by the participants, I tried my hardest to give a fair consideration of as many as I could, ultimately prioritizing entries that seemed excellent for some target audience over those which seemed pretty good for a wider audience.

I've been reflecting on whether it's worth all the time put in. I feel very inspired by the channels that have emerged from the last three years of doing this, although it's hard to say which of them might have started anyway without SoME. Each year of doing it probably costs about one 3blue1brown video in terms of my own time put in, maybe a little more, which feels like a relatively small price considering what comes out of it. Still, wonder if there are diminishing returns from one year to the next.

With all the person-hours, poured into the content creation from participants, from the peer-reviewer in the community, and from those of us organizing, it seems worth asking whether all that is necessarily being pointed in the most productive direction. For example, could the same efforts instead go toward creating material more explicitly helpful to students and teachers in classrooms?

If we do something like this again next year, I'm open to changing up the goals and framing quite a bit, and I'm curious to hear if any of you have thoughts on the best way to orchestrate the effort and energy from the community that the past three SoME's have represented.

Grant