Hi Alexander and others, :)
What I did in the past 2+ days
I reviewed your comments carefully and talked with a subset of the WLM international team including Ilya about the issues you have raised. I also reached out to few people outside of the team, to hear their thoughts and experiences, and here I am proposing the next steps.
Next steps
* Ilya will be looking to onboard one person to work with him on the code-base. This person will also create the redundancy that you mentioned in your notes earlier. Ideally, between Ilya and this person, the response time will be "same-day" except for non-critical requests. (If you know Scala or you know Java and you are passionate to get to the Scala world, please contact Ilya, and cc me.)
* Ilya will give it a try to move the code-base to Tools this week. This will make sure that the service will have a standard up-time we can count on. There are three tasks associated with this effort: T141910, T124902, T141908. You can find them at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/view/2005/. Ilya and I will review the tasks at the end of this week and re-assess the time they require.
* Given the time crunch, Ilya and I discussed pursuing a plan B or an alternative tool that the international team can work on while Ilya is busy fixing bugs and improving WLX in the coming weeks. Based on this conversation, I have started reaching out to the owners of the 5 other jury tools. In the coming days, my attention will be focused on assessing where these tools are at the moment, and figuring out if offering one of them as an alternative makes sense. We also discussed the option of developing another tool. Basically, all options are on the table with plan b at the moment.
* I will do my best to send updates to wikilovesmonuments public list about the progress with regards to the jury tool. If you don't hear from me and you want to hear more, please ask on the list, and I will get back to you there. :)
Help needed
We have a short time before the start of the contest, and I want us to feel confident that we will have a solid tool for everyone when we start on Sep. 1. We cannot do this alone though:
* If we are to adapt any of the current tools or create a new tool, we are under a time crunch. If you can help with usability testing of the tool we will work on under time constraints, please let me know off-list.
* We also may need help for further developing one of the current tools, or creating a new one. If you have time to help with that under the current time constraints, please email me off-list with information about the languages you are comfortable with and maybe a GitHub repository of (a sample of) your past work.
And last but not least, I want to assure you that coming up with a solution for the jury tool(s) that we can use more smoothly during this year's WLM contest has a high priority for the international team. You have our commitments here. :)
Best,
Leila, on behalf of the WLM international team