Hi all,

[If you are organizing WLM for the first time in your country, you can stop reading this email here. Please reach out to me when you get to a point that you should decide which jury tool to use in your jury process and I will help you navigate. :) If you are not interested in detailed updates about the jury tool discussion, you can also stop here. :).]

Our last update for the jury tool to this list was on 2016-08-08. Sorry for the delay in updating this list with the status. We needed more time than expected to get to this point.

* We took the list of requirements for the jury tool and reviewed the code-base of 5 out of six jury tools. We also reviewed the UX (for juror and admin) by testing an instance of each of these tools. 

* The goal of the above exercise was to find one tool that meets the requirements for the jury tool set by the WLM international team or find a tool that can, with a reasonable developer effort, get to a stage to meet those requirements.

* We learned through this process that the current tools at their current state don't meet the requirements (This is not a shortcoming of the tools. Quite a few were designed for specific use-cases, and the requirements set by the international team were broader than those use-cases). We also learned that we cannot gather a 3-4 person team of developers around any of the existing tools to meet the deadline for this year's contest (the languages, environments, and the way code was developed were the main blockers for finding these developers). The lack of such a team would make the maintainability of the tool in the long run problematic as well.

Based on what we learned through the above exercise, our discussions, and the needs communicated to us by some countries, we have decided to develop a new jury tool for this year's contest. (And I promise you that we tried really hard to not add another one. If you are curious, I'd be happy to discuss this with you further off-list.)

* Developer team: Mahmoud Hashemi, Stephen LaPorte (volunteer time), Yuvi (volunteer time) have signed up to develop this new jury tool (for now called montage). Yan Nasonov has volunteered to help where we need a hand.

* Jean-Fred and I will work closely with the team above to make sure the tool is going to meet the requirements set by the WLM international team for the jury tool.

* We will be able to give a more accurate timeline for when the tool will be ready for this year's contest by 2016-08-31.

*The UX testing of the tool will need to happen in the coming weeks. If you are a jury coordinator in your country this year, you are going to be a juror, or you have worked in one of these capacities in the past years and you can help us with UX testing, please message me off-list.

* You can find a high level design description (still in draft and being updated) of the tool being built here. If you'd like to provide feedback, please reach out to me, or create a new issue here. Please note that our priority for this year is to have a basic and reliable tool, we won't be able to accommodate all issues created, but they will help us for future improvements in the tool.

Last but not least, I'd like to thank all the people who came together to help us get to this point and make an informed decision about the next steps. This includes: David Narvaez, Ilya, Jean-Fred, Lodewijk, Mahmoud, Paweł, Ruben, Stephen, Yan Nasonov, Yarl, and Yuvi. (I do hope I haven't missed anyone.)

 

If you have any questions or comments, please let us know.

Best,

Leila, on behalf of the WLM international team