Laeserin on Nostr: And before anyone asks, the obvious solution to this is using Nostr to decide who ...

And before anyone asks, the obvious solution to this is using Nostr to decide who gets a Nostr grant. You don't need backroom interviews and groveling supplicants to decide how to spend money to promote an open communications protocol.

Use the protocol.

People should just write up an explanation of their stuff in a long-form note and link to it from a Grant Application wiki table. And then we can all watch the process go down, read through the results and explanation of why each application was accepted or rejected, and add congratulatory zaps to the winners and condolence zaps to the losers.
And add a handicap score to the applications, to make it a fairer game.

The losers are automatically entered into the next round, unless they withdraw, and have a chance to better their application beforehand.