Hello,
I finally found time to talk to Evgeny about our AskBot instance. I worked myself through the BugZilla entries (and commented on a few ;-), and compiled a list of all open tasks and issues I am aware of.
I think there has been quite some communication problem in the past - looking at the requests, there have been some that are clearly out of scope of a regular service contract, as they were asking for heavy rewriting or feature implementation of AskBot itself.
Other tasks, however, are clearly bugs that need fixing. As usual, many people yelling at the same time in parallel doesn't make things better and as we have seen, utterly delays the real important tasks. 
I have now sent Evgeny a list of all these tasks, with my estimation on what is a bug and what is a feature. He will review it by next week, let me know if he shares my view and makes a proposal on a service contract including maintenance and bugfixing, plus his hourly rate for feature implementation should we desperately need some of these soon.
As with regards to other languages, I now learned that the ease of setting those up depends of the support of the SOLR search engine. Some languages are easier, others not. I will send Evgeny a list of languages required, and he will let me know what works quite easy and what not - I asked to, even if some functionality is missing, roll out as many as possible soon, to finally make people happy. The list I currently have is:
- Spanish
- Arabic
- Croatian
- Japanese
- German
Are there more languages where we have people willing to moderate (and if necessary translate the interface), so I can put it on the list?
One last comment: Given the amount of (unsuccessful) communication in the past, please poke *ME* or this website list for requests, so I can coordinate. Everyone sending Evgeny their wishes is not the most fruitful option available. 
Thanks, and sorry again for those delays,
Florian