On most weekdays,
there is a fair bit of activity, except for occasional periods of
lull. I assume you probably caught a period of lull.
The parsoid team is mostly based in California, and tend to be online PST working hours, ie noon-8pm EST on weekdays. That's the best time to contact people. Some members of the team use an IRC bot to let them catch up on backlog when they're not online, but not all, so if you don't get a response it's usually best to either send an email to wikitext or else just wait until the next 'working day'.
You and Scott have similar goals then since he is interested in
using Parsoid in situations without internet or spotty internet as
well, if I understand it correctly. In this context, he has been
doing some code cleanup, handling some edge cases, and contributing
patches.
There are instructions on the wiki for cloning the git repo of parsoid and running your own instance. I've also successfully set up an instance on a free appfog server; let me know if you're interested in that (and maybe I should think about merging those patches to make it easier for others).
If you're interested in offline wikibrowser tech, I'd love to have help. The novel thing I'd like to do here is allow offline wiki editing, snarfing in some of the visual editor codebase to do so with panache. One Laptop per Child has over two million laptops in the field with offline copies of spanish and english wikipedia, but the current app is read-only -- which defeats the purpose of a wiki, really. The current app's snapshot is also out of date, because the original version required a lot of offline tools to grunge over a wikipedia xml dump to make a new snapshot; my goal is for this next version of the app to be able to update its snapshot itself whenever it's online.
--scott