End of 2024 development update
Progress, one bit at a time...
Hello all! I’m writing on behalf of our small volunteer team with a brief update on development progress.
Like all volunteer efforts in academia, work happens a sliver at a time.
Andrew has been giving an hour or so a week to make progress on policies and governance. We view these as key to the long term success of this effort, and are taking our time to think through the many challenges of managing power.
Jérémie and I have been working on the implementation, a few hours each weekend at a time. That is of course super slow, but I’ve been happy with the 4-5 hours I find on most Sunday afternoon to make progress. Some of our framework choices — Supabase, Svelte, and Typescript —have helped immensely in making the most of limited time.
I’d estimate we’re at 60% functional completeness based on our design specification, with a few things that are probably outside the scope of our minimally viable platform. Here are the key remaining things to do:
Representation of paper submissions in the database schema. We have to track things like a paper’s title, a unique identifier, and who’s assigned to review. This isn’t (yet) a reviewing platform, so this is the kind of information we’ll extract from integrations with reviewing platforms.
All email notifications and functionality. This is a key part of integrating with other reviewing platforms, so editors and program committee chairs don’t have to migrate from existing tools (and so that we don’t have feature creep on this platform). If Reciprocal Reviews takes off, I could see it eventually being a reviewing platform of it’s own, but no need to start there, as there are plenty of other reasonable platforms already.
ORCID authentication. For the nerds in the audience, the key sticking point is that ORCID has some narrow support for OAuth, but Supabase has some constraints on OAuth support, that create barriers to using ORCID for authentication. It also requires that OAuth providers expose an email ORCID doesn’t expose emails by default, creating a login barrier. Jérémie is investigating options. We all believe that the project would be best served by starting with the global ID for scholars rather than relying on unstable email addresses
Engineering bits. We need a healthy set of automated tests for key functionality and transactions, better workflows for contributors.
That’s it, aside from some nice to haves, and features that can come after a beta release. We have everything else we believe is important for launch implemented. If you’re a developer, you can see all of our progress in our public GitHub repository.
At this rate, I’m hopeful we’ll be able to launch a beta sufficient for an ACM Transactions on Computing Education pilot in Q2. I’ll personally continue to have a good chunk of each Sunday to make progress.
If you’re interested in helping us get across the finish line, write Amy!