[Wiki Loves Monuments] acute problems with the WLX jury tool during WLE-2016

[Lily]

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

On Sun, Jul 31, 2016 at 7:22 AM, Lily <lilyofthewest.wikimedia at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi Alexander,
>
> Thank you for sharing your experience. We will review your comments in the
> WLM international team and will get back to you by 2016-08-03. In terms
> of the timelines, there is a general understanding in the team that we'd
> like to have a fully functional jury tool before WLM kicks off on Sep. 1.
> Otherwise, we will have many sleepless nights and create many more of those
> for others. It's our high priority to avoid that. :)
>
> Best,
> Leila, on behalf of WLM international team
>
> On Sun, Jul 31, 2016 at 6:55 AM, Alexander Tsirlin <altsirlin at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> We had very bad experience with using the WLX jury tool this year. I
>> described it at length here:
>> https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:WLX_Jury_Tool
>>
>> Several possible solutions are also mentioned on that page. I would like
>> to hear your opinion about this situation. Could anyone help Ilya with
>> developing and maintaining the jury tool, and make sure that it works at it
>> should work?
>>
>> If we are planning to meet a very sharp deadline of October 25 for WLM
>> photos, the jury tool should work absolutely smoothly, and user support has
>> to be very prompt. Or it would be good to know already now that we can't
>> rely on the jury tool, and alternative solutions should be searched for.
>>
>> Sincerely,
>> Alexander
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wiki Loves Monuments mailing list
>> WikiLovesMonuments at lists.wikimedia.org
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilovesmonuments
>> http://www.wikilovesmonuments.org
>
>
>
>
> --
> User: LilyOfTheWest
>



-- 
User: LilyOfTheWest
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