The Community is kicking off a two-month community hackathon focused on clearing out the Open edX PR review backlog. The goal is simple: by the end of June, no community-authored PR should have been waiting on engineering review for more than two months.
@antoviaque identified perhaps a key reason why in the same thread: it’s not easy to feel legitimate reviewing PRs in an unfamiliar codebase. The idea behind this hackathon is that doing ittogether makes it easier. Even without merge rights, CCs can add real value by doing a first pass. The full planning discussion happened in wg-governance issue #163.
How it works
Browse the hackathon board view, pick any PR you feel comfortable weighing in on, and leave a review or comment. You don’t need merge rights — even pointing out nits or confirming things look good helps maintainers move faster.
The board has 40+ PRs in scope: status “Ready for Review” or “In Eng Review”, opened before April 1st.
Tracking progress
We’ll post weekly updates in this thread with a leaderboard of contributors. A contributor is anyone who leaves a review or comment on a PR they didn’t author, during the hackathon window (May 11 – end of June). At the end of June, we’ll assess how many PRs were cleared.
Organizations already on board
OpenCraft and eduNEXT have committed contributor hours to this effort. If your organization would like to participate and be listed here, drop a comment below — we’d love to have you!
This is a collaborative effort
We’re figuring things out as we go. If you have thoughts on how the process should work, questions about scope, or suggestions for how to make this more useful — please share them here. We have a few days before the May 11 kickoff specifically to discuss and refine things together.
Thanks to @antoviaque for the original idea, and to @itsjeyd and @jalondonot for helping shape the scope. Let’s clean things up!
Hi all, the two-month review sprint has officially started. Head over to the hackathon board view and pick a PR to review — any comment or review on a PR you didn’t author counts toward the leaderboard.
Thanks. Why is “In Eng Review” included, or at least PRs with the waiting on author label? Is part of the hackathon to simply ping the author to get a response? Or can we close PRs where the author hasn’t responded after X requests? Thank you.
@robrap thanks for chiming in! The way we saw it, “In Eng Review” is included because many of those PRs have stalled — a reviewer started but never finished, or left feedback that was never followed up on. The hackathon is a good opportunity to pick those back up and push them to completion.
For PRs tagged “waiting on author” — we’ve discussed this and decided to keep them in scope for now. A gentle ping to the author is a valid contribution, but I agree that if there’s no response after a reasonable time, closing the PR cleanly is also an option. Better to have a clear outcome than let it sit indefinitely. I’m curious to see what others (@itsjeyd@antoviaque ) think? What’s a reasonable time?
I wonder if @Michelle_Philbrick has a runbook for how many times an author will be pinged, or how long a PR can remain unanswered, before closing?
I personally would err toward closing sooner rather than later, with a friendly message about re-opening the PR if and when the author wishes to continue. Maybe the author gets 2 pings, with at least 2 weeks of no response afterwards each time, before closing?
If no response or activity from PR author for a month, leave a message asking them if they’re still planning to continue working on the PR.
If no response or activity from PR author for another two weeks after that, close PR (with a friendly message saying they’re welcome to reopen the PR if they do decide to come back to it, as you mentioned @robrap).
+1 - and a closed PR can always be re-opened. For the timeline, the 2 weeks @tikr mentioned sound like plenty.
Thanks for the update! That’s a start, but it’s a slow start… Maybe the participating organizations and core contributors could dedicate more specific time for this? @gabrieldamours For OpenCraft, could we create tickets for all the code core contributors to do 2-3 reviews in the upcoming sprint?
No new activity since week 1 – same numbers, same contributors – so I’ll skip the update for this week. Now that the conference is over, it’s time to step up and review some PRs!
We went from 4 contributors last week to 9 — thanks to everyone who’s jumped in! We still have 37 PRs waiting, and one full month left. Browse the board and pick one!
We went from 9 contributors to 15 this week, with @mphilbrick211 jumping to the top with comments on 12 PRs! We’re halfway through the hackathon with 36 PRs still waiting. Pick one from the board and help us close them out!
We grew from 15 to 18 contributors this week — thanks @xitij2000, @dcoa, and @navinkarkera! 35 PRs still need attention and the hackathon ends June 30. Pick one from the board and help us push through!
2 PRs merged
2 PRs closed without merge
38 PRs still open
42 PRs in scope