Contributions Review Spring Cleaning Hackathon — Starting May 11!

Community
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Hey everyone,

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.

Get started → Hackathon board view

Background

This hackathon grew out of two recent discussions (worth reading if you want the full context):

  • @itsjeyd’s analysis in How long would it take to clear the OSPR backlog? showed that the collective capacity of maintainers and CCs should theoretically be enough to handle the volume — and yet the backlog persists.

  • @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 it together 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! :broom:

Cheers!

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:broom: The spring cleaning hackathon is now live!

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.

First weekly update coming next Monday. Let’s go! :rocket:

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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.

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@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?

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:broom: Hackathon Week 1 Update

We’re one week into the Contributions Review Spring Cleaning Hackathon. Here’s where things stand:

Progress so far:

  • :white_check_mark: 2 PRs merged

  • :cross_mark: 2 PRs closed without merge

  • :counterclockwise_arrows_button: 38 PRs still open

  • :clipboard: 42 PRs in scope

Leaderboard

Rank Contributor Reviews Comments PRs touched
1 @MaferMazu 1 1 1
2 @gabrieldamours 0 3 3
3 @ormsbee 1 0 1
4 @itsjeyd 0 1 1

Thanks to everyone who’s jumped in so far! :raising_hands:

We’re just getting started — if you haven’t joined yet, browse the board and pick a PR. Even a single comment counts!

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That sounds great.

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?