Fall progress

Phew, what an Autumn! After a long summer of healing and some great design conversations with Jérémie, I think we’re in the final stretch. We have about 12 issues left in our beta milestone (and I’m sure another dozen issues lurking).

Here are the primary issues remaining:

• ORCID integration. Supabase has been great for streamlining development, but they don’t yet support arbitrarily flexible OAuth support, and so using ORCID itself for authentication isn’t yet directly possible. We have a fallback plan if that doesn’t happen that still involves ORCID integration.

• Bidding improvements. We’ve been implementing a bidding feature, which is key for a community to indicate interest in reviews. There are some confidentiality and usability improvements to make to this feature before it’s ready to pilot.

• Confidentiality support. Most academic venues have complex rules about who can see what, double anonymous reviewing being the most common. We need to build some ability to support these various rules (or at least the rules sufficient for double anonymous reviewing).

• Automated testing. As the design has been fluid, we haven’t yet invested heavily in tests, and so before we deploy a beta, we want to build out an end-to-end test suite to mirror the design requirements we’ve specified. This may also involve some unit tests for key logic.

• Gift pools. While this isn’t necessarily critical for piloting, we would like to launch with the ability for people to create and propose gift pools, to donate their tokens and distribute them to others, defraying the cost of submission. This isn’t too hard to build out with the existing infrastructure.

I’m finding 4-5 hours each Sunday to chip away at the above and Jérémie is chipping away at authentication. I’m confident we’ll be able to launch in 2026 some time — assuming I don’t get in any more bike accidents!

— Amy