Contributors Meetup Async Update - August 19th, 2023 - September 1st, 2023

Working Groups Core Contributors
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Core Contributors Update: Aug 19 - Sep 1, 2023

Use the jump links below to view the section that interests you:

1. Working Groups Updates

Working Groups Calendar

1.1. BTR Working Group

Chair: @jalondonot

:paperclip: Latest news

  • Action Items for Q release :chart_with_upwards_trend::
  • Quince release planning:
    • Near deadlines:
      • Mon 2023-10-09 - :scissors: quince.master
      • Mon 2023-12-11 - :one: quince.1
  • Early red flagsđŸš©:
    • Django 4.2 upgrade (ask Axim Ned - 2U Jeremy Bowman)
    • Confirming Dean’s role
    • Which MFEs will be included in Quince?

:memo: Meeting notes

1.2. Contributor Coordination Working Group

Chair: Jorge Londoño

:paperclip: Latest news

:memo: Meeting notes

1.3. Data Working Group

Chair: @e0d & @blarghmatey

:paperclip: Latest news

  • FC updates
    • Redis bus last PR delayed
    • Rory on through Oct
    • Possibly more Aspects FCs to speed up v1
  • Aspects updates
    • v1 report missing data being gathered - mostly completions and grading
    • Last discussions PR merged!
    • 300m load test and performance enhancements in progress
    • 4 tickets left for beta

:memo: Meeting notes

1.4. DEPR Working Group

Chair: @feanil

:paperclip: Latest news

:memo: Meeting notes

1.5. DevEx Working Group

Chair: @Rebecca_S_Graber & @kmccormick

:paperclip: Latest news

  • Container Runtime Comparison
    • Docker desktop starting charging recently depending on some confusing criteria, including for orgs of 2U’s size
    • Docker Desktop vs Engine
      • Engine is free - it runs on Linux
      • Docker Desktop adds a VM to run Docker Engine. This is why it’s required on macOS
      • Colima is just the VM - it runs Docker Engine in the VM itself
  • For Open edX devs
    • You can stick with Docker Desktop
    • Can try OrbStack, although it might cost money
    • Colima - also worth trying
  • Notes:
    • Note that Docker Engine cannot run directly on
    • For Docker, OrbStack, and Colima: All intended to be compatible implementations of docker
    • OrbStack doesn’t seem to be a big company – all their PR and all our interactions with them(?) have been with a single person
    • OrbStack has a nice volume mounting interface - works around bind-mouting slowness on macOS
  • Cross Pollination
    • They have a team at 2U that is lookin into implementing their own version of developer data. It is currently very enterprise-centric, so not quite as useful to the community yet, but hopefully will be in the future.
  • They have announced and set acceptance dates on two significant deprecation tickets:
  • Arch-BOM is considering work to make it easier to deploy the LMS and Studio in Kubernetes (at least at 2U, may help others as well)
  • Successes
    • Kyle have been using Tutor + Library Authoring Plugin in order to work on Content Libraries V2, and it’s been going smoothly
    • Starting now (in Nightly) and in Quince, Tutor will assume docker buildx is available, which is much better at parallelization, caching, & has a better interface.

:memo: Meeting notes

1.6. DevOps Working Group

Chair: RĂ©gis Behmo

:paperclip: Latest news

:memo: Meeting notes

1.7. Educators Working Group

Chair: @john_curricume

:paperclip: Latest news

:memo: Meeting notes

Blockers or Calls/offers for help

  • Looking for any and all documentors!

1.8. Frontend Working Group

Chair: @arbrandes

:paperclip: Latest news

:memo: Meeting notes

1.9. Large Instances Working Group

Chair: @braden & @Felipe

:paperclip: Latest news

  • eduNEXT
    • worked on getting richie to install on k8s instance using richie-factory
    • investigated caddy errors and ways to bypass it when reaching ~30 rps
    • will write tickets in harmony by asking Cristhian from the Data WG whan needs to happen to give better support to aspects
  • 2U
  • OpenCraft
    • Gabor returned from some time off and it is ready to review the PR 41 in harmony. This work requires the review of Jhony Avella who has also returned from vacation.
  • In 3 weeks time Gabor will be moving indefinitely to a place where the timezone is a bit further away. We’d like to ask all the regular attendees of this meeting if they can relocate to a different time to make it easier for him to continue participating. For this we will use the following poll:

:memo: Meeting notes

1.10. Marketing Working Group

Chair: Eden Huthmacher

:paperclip: Latest news

  • Next (quarterly) external conference to attend - LWMOOCs (October 2023)
    • Educause - only as attendee, since there were no co-sponsors
  • Next Open edX meetup featuring Thai MOOCs and Cap-Net (UN Education Program) - register here: The Open edX Platform: Increasing Access to Underserved Learners
  • Next quarterly conference proposal: Bett in London
  • TOC nominations will start on August 29th - please look out for the blog announcement next Tuesday and help spread the word to get more voters involved
    • Looking for recommendation on voting apps - we used CIVS last time
      • We are looking for the following voter profiles:
      • Operator & Core Community Representative - elected by the project’s Core Contributors and Maintainers
      • Instructor Representative - elected by all individuals producing or running an active course on the Open edX platform
      • User/Learner Representative - elected by everyone using the Open edX platform in any capacity
  • OKR Review (starting at item 16): OKRÂŽS MWG

:memo: Meeting notes

1.11. Maintainers

Chair: Edward Zarecor

:paperclip: Latest news

  • We need to converge on a plan for phase 3 rapidly. Ideally we could kick that off immediately.
    • react-unit-test-utils was bumped, per Slack convo from phase 2 to phase 3.
    • Based on other conversations about maintenance plans, we pulled edx-platform into phase 3. We’ll need to coordinate plans for supporting it with Jeremy Bowman
    • We also added frontend-app-learner-dashboard to phase 3 scope.
    • Edward Zarecor will coordinate pulling in all Aspects related repos to be maintained by Axim for phase 3.
  • Ned Batchelder will work with 2U maintainers to move repos from pending to confirmed as quickly as reasonable. He’ll come back with a proposed schedule for that.
  • Feanil Patel will write up an ADR on OEP-55 to propose that all new repos much come with a commitment to maintain them.

:memo: Meeting notes

1.12. Product Working Group

Chair: Jenna Makowski

:paperclip: Latest news

  • Core Product: Strategy doc has gone through feedback loop with WG
  • Next steps: Open to community feedback, working session for Assessment Core capability
  • LTI: MVP focuses on configuration and reuse
  • Next steps: Proposal open for review
  • UX/UI:
    • Mobile: Approved new mobile applications as default future Open edX mobile applications. Draft of Open edX Mobile Product Vision / Direction is in review by the subgroup, with more work in the coming weeks to unpack this. Current development focus is on the Project - Learning Site Selection (FC-25a) capability to help providers build 1 iOS and 1 Android application for their clients and thus expand the use of the mobile applications for much lower cost than previously possible. Additionally, a funded contribution focused on updating mobile APIs is also in development.

:memo: Meeting notes

1.13. Security Working Group

Chair: Feanil Patel

:paperclip: Latest news

:memo: Meeting notes

1.14. TOC

Chair: Ed Zarecor

:memo: Meeting notes

1.15. Translation Working Group

Chair: Eden Huthmacher

:paperclip: Latest news

:memo: Meeting notes

2. Events

Would anyone like to highlight any past or upcoming events? Let us know in the comments!

3. Projects

Are there any new or ongoing projects you’d like to discuss? Get the conversation started in the comments below.

4. Next async update and meetup

  • Friday Sep 1 - Update async
  • Tuesday Sep 5 - Join the meetup here!
  • Details and draft agenda on the GitHub board

:speech_balloon: Anything to add?

If there’s anything else you’d like to mention, please let us know in the comments below.

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@Natalia_Choconta Thank you for the async update! :+1:

For the TOC, there has been a new meeting note published, see 2023-08-08 TOC Meeting Summary – you can get them through the tag Topics tagged toc . Also the chair is Ed Zarecor :slight_smile: I’m only a member posting some of the meeting summaries.

Btw, anything anyone can do to make updating each working group detail easier? Do you get the updates from each working group, or do you have to go dig for the information yourself?

For the core contributor coordination group, it’s worth linking to the meeting notes section in the wiki, which has the latest? https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/COMM/pages/3820191745 . What is currently listed in “Meeting notes” could be an item for the “Latest news” section, and with Contributors Meetup - Call for participation & meeting time poll as recent news.

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Thanks @antoviaque. Answering your questions:

  1. I already updated the TOC group with what you mentioned, thanks for the clarification.
  2. I look for the information by myself, reading the notes of each group.
  3. I already generated the update of the CCWG notes, thanks :blush:
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@Natalia_Choconta Great, thank you!

  • I look for the information by myself, reading the notes of each group.

I feared you would end up with doing a lot of it yourself by hand :slight_smile: Is there a way to facilitate your life with this? Maybe a standard section in each working group wiki page, where group members could include those updates for you?

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And here is the core contributors sprint update, for the past two sprints - both @Dean and I were off for the previous sprint, so the two sprints are grouped in one update.

Time contributed

A total of 553 hours have been contributed by 25 participants. The average is:

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Core contributor Hours contributed
Kyle McCormick 90
Cristhian Garcia 60
Andrés Gonzålez 40
Dave Ormsbee 40
Maria Grimaldi 40
Braden 31
Angie Ruiz 30
Ali Hugo 23
Felipe Montoya 22
Kshitij 20
Pierre Mailhot 18
Ana Garcia 17
Peter Pinch 16
Santiago Suarez 16
Xavier Antoviaque 14.5
Piotr 13
Cassie 11.75
Zia Fazal 11
Gabriel 9.75
Jill 9.5
Matjaz Gregoric 7
GĂĄbor 5
Fox 4
Fayyaz Ahmed 3
Navin 1

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Blockers & improvements needed

Blocker Core contributor
How do we make sure strings in frontend-app-communications are send to Transifex? How do we make sure strings in frontend-app-course-authoring, and frontend-lib-content-components that is using it, are send to Transifex? Pierre Mailhot
I need someone to review fix: type hints weren't installed properly, add type hints for Django Fields by bradenmacdonald · Pull Request #259 · openedx/opaque-keys · GitHub so I can merge it please. It’s a small PR that fixes type hints for opaque-keys so they’ll be seen in edx-platform and has no runtime changes. Braden
That not all the team members has shown compromise and interest on the various tasks Angie Ruiz
There is a proposal to deprecate xqueue and xqueue-watcher at [DEPR]: xqueue and xqueue-watcher · Issue #214 · openedx/public-engineering · GitHub. If anyone in the open edX community is using either of these tools, it would be helpful to get their input. Peter Pinch
We need broader attendance from different parts of the community and working groups at the contributors meetup - it’s now only once every 4 weeks, and is focused on discussing concrete issues or topics brought up async by community members over the past month. See Contributors Meetup - Call for participation & meeting time poll - #2 by antoviaque Xavier Antoviaque

What went well?

Comment Core contributor
I had time to work on a few CC issues that have been in my backlog for ages! Ali Hugo
I think that we are getting the focus in the right place Santiago Suarez
I was able to do meaningful contributions. GĂĄbor
Translating and reviewing strings for fr_CA in Transifex. Browsing Discourse and Slack in order to keep updated or trying to help others if needed. Pierre Mailhot
Vacation! And still a few community topics moved forward: progress on the PR delays discussions, along with the maintainership program: Pull Requests Review Delays Xavier Antoviaque

Work done

Development

  • Enabled design tokens theming for MFEs (Kshitij Sobti)
  • Finish almost aspects v1, contributions for event-sink, for completion and for aspects (Cristhian Garcia)
  • Continued work on adding more type hints and type checking to the platform. (Braden MacDonald)
  • Get frontend-app-communications and frontend-app-ora-grading into Palm, get frontend-app-learner-dashboard and frontend-app-library-authoring in an experimental state, via openedx-tutor-plugins (Adolfo R. Brandes)
  • Addressed an issue with events and multi-question problems with event-routing-backends#325 (Jill Vogel)
  • Review and work on adding new charts to the K8s harmony project (GĂĄbor Boros)
  • Fixed problematic MakoService API, added type hints to more repos, and worked on kernel vs. bundled dependencies (Braden MacDonald)
  • Report a bug in ecom [ECOM > Create a course seat] > After creating course I am not able to open its detail page · Issue #301 · openedx/wg-build-test-release · GitHub (Fayyaz Ahmed)

Product & UX

  • Confirmation of driving the Graded Discussions project along with ASU from a product perspective,
    reviewed new formatting for the Async Report and Sprint Retro, proposed improved formatting for the Core Contributor updates and began planning interviews with a handful of Core Contributors (Ali Hugo)
  • Reviewed the design for the new Studio Home and gave feedback (Ali Hugo)
  • Created a first iteration of a prototype and conducted a usability test (Santiago Suarez)
  • Product strategy - Moved review comments to wiki https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/COMM/pages/3816521766/Proposal+Open+edX+Core+Product+Strategy (Xavier Antoviaque)

Reviews

  • Review PRs and alignment of ORA work for in-campus efforts (Felipe Montoya)
  • Participation in reviews for the large instances meeting and large Campus WG meeting (Felipe Montoya)
  • Reviewed PRs 341 and 339 (Zia Fazal)
  • Review of Proposals for Aspects extensions and the first metrics (Felipe Montoya)

Release & testing

  • Ensure the ecommerce plugin is functioning correctly with Palm (Pierre Mailhot)
  • Rebasing of Open edX fork and testing for the migration to Palm (Pierre Mailhot)
  • Found translation issues (string not harvested) in frontend-app-communications, frontend-app-course-authoring and frontend-lib-content-components (Pierre Mailhot)

Governance

Translations

  • Translation and review of strings for fr_CA in Transifex (Pierre Mailhot)

Documentation & training

Plans for next sprint

Plans Core contributor
- Core sprint report - Review redesign - OEP for escalation process to TOC - Follow-up - Onboarding to upstreaming course - Test video editing Xavier Antoviaque
- Response to [DEPR]: xqueue and xqueue-watcher · Issue #214 · openedx/public-engineering · GitHub - ongoing efforts to get ProctorTrack working outside of edx.org - ongoing investigation into issues with grades not persisting reliably Peter Pinch
I will be away for the second week of the coming sprint but hope to set up user interviews with a handful of Core Contributors as soon as I’m back. Ali Hugo
I’ll be away most of the sprint. Braden
Meeting of the Build-Test-Release Working Group (Sep 4). Meeting of the Open edX contributors discussion (Sep 5). Meeting of Developer Experience Working Group (Sep 11). Testing Palm.2 with our own fork. Open edX Community Meeting (Sep 7). Pierre Mailhot
Reaching out to ASU to discuss how we can get the Graded Discussions Spec started. Cassie
We are going to create a full product discovery process to propose features to the community to learn how to get product things merged Santiago Suarez

Responses

Response rate decreased slightly to 34% - August vacations?

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The detail and raw data for this sprint are available on the report page on Listaflow.

Btw @ali_hugo I didn’t get the time to review your improved report, so I just used my old one - but I plan to :slight_smile:

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Addressing blockers:

Translation strings not sent to Transifex

This topic has been brought up and discussed in this week’s contributor meetup:

These are included as official in Olive.
The message are properly handled in the code, but they are not being pushed to Transifex.
FE App Component is another issue, it is not tagged as it’s a library. There’s also a bug for this library that needs to be address. @arbrandes has context on this issue and will investigate.

@arbrandes Did you end up taking on this issue, or does it still need to find an assignee? I remember that you mentioned an existing issue about this - is it the one linked on https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/COMM/pages/3856924673/2023-09-05+CC+Working+Group+Meeting+Notes – ie No Transifex resource!!! · Issue #146 · openedx/frontend-app-communications · GitHub ?

Review help

There were 3 volunteers at the contributor meetup - thanks! :slight_smile:

Maria will review, Stefania will ask Ghassan and Alexz will try to get someone from Raccoon Gang.

Compromise and interest

@Angie_Ruiz I’m not sure what you refer to - could you explain it a bit more? Which team was it, and what were the compromise to make?

Deprecation of xqueue and xqueue-watcher

And highlighting this one, as I missed mentioning it during the last contributors meetup. ^

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I’m taking it on, yes! I created new issues to track progress.

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Thanks! Feel free to review whenever you get the chance - there’s no rush. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Yes, it would be good for each working group wiki page to place a highlights section with the most important information about the group and which they want to communicate to the entire community :blush:

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@Natalia_Choconta Sounds good - a good next step on this would be to confirm the content/sections we would want in there - is it always “Latest news” and “Meeting notes”? Maybe also a “Last updated” field, so you know if the information needs to be updated or not?

We could add this list to one of the working groups pages, like the contributor coordination working group (CC @jalondonot ) and then ask each of the other working group chairs if they would be ok to add and update this section, after each meeting or sprint?

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Hi @antoviaque! Sorry for the delay in responding. Yes, it seems like a very good idea to have a “last updated” section.

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@Natalia_Choconta Sounds good :+1: Then the next step is probably to reach out to the working group chairs to ask them if they are willing to do this, and if so add the section to their wiki page. If you have time to do this, go ahead - otherwise I can do it when I come back from vacation in a few weeks.