Core Contributor Check-in: Dec 23, 2023 - Jan 5, 2024
Happy New Year Core Contributors! Here’s to a year of amazing contributions 
I’m stepping in for @Dean for a little while. So, for those of you who don’t know me, I’m Cassie, I’m a Product Manager and UX/UI Designer at OpenCraft.
Let me get right to it. Here’s a snapshot of our last CC sprint…
Core Contributor Hours
It wasn’t the most productive sprint, but given the sprint was over the holiday season, that could be the reason
There was a total of 60 hours of contributions reported, which is 180 hours less than the previous sprint of 240 hours.
The overall checklist response rate was 24% for this sprint, which is a 4% increase from last sprint. The last 4 sprints have seen an average of about 24% in response rate.
Summary of Responses
I’ve included a few points from the previous 3 sprints (dating back to 11 November 2023) in the summaries below. The last few CC Check-in reports weren’t generated, but some points are still relevant.
1. Do you need any help? Or is there anything you’d like to collaborate on?
- Would like help reviewing feedback on PR 33963 which fixes a bug found with persistent grades.
- Has asked for input from the community, especially the BTR and Architecture Working Groups. The Aspects project has received a community contribution that will allow events to be sent from the “completion aggregator” to Aspects. This is good stuff! But, since the completion aggregator isn’t a standard Open edX project, and not part of the regular requirements, there’s debate as to where the code should live. It’s also raising issues around dependencies and release version compatibility. For more information visit Add Aggregator Events and Add Tracking Logs.
- Would like more maintainers, and organizations to pick up maintainerships. Any takers?
2. What should we improve? Are there any blockers?
- Has asked if it’s possible for all working group meetings to either be recorded, or generate automatic meeting notes, so that CC’s who aren’t able to attend the meetings can still see what’s been discussed.
- It would also be great if there was a way to improve liaison and visibility between Working Groups; preferably something async that is not too admin-heavy.
- Has found that there have been delays on upstream PR reviews.
- Mentioned that many workflows are still very synchronous within the community, which makes it hard to keep in touch if you don’t have a lot of synchronous time - ie. using Zoom and Slack. Making better use of async places like Github tickets, Discourse, or the Wiki will help mitigate this.
3. What did you accomplish this sprint?
- Is awaiting the official announcement from management about the closing of their Open edX instance later this spring, or early this summer. The related working groups are aware of this.
- Investigated the ORA steps for extensibility.
- Moved the meeting topics for Contributors WG to Github.
- Follow-up and answers on Core Sprints (async).
- Reviewed the frontend-app-course-authoring PRs.
- Spent time planning OpenCraft’s attendance of the 2024 Open edX Conference.
- Caught up on CC conversations that took place while on leave.
- Launched the second deployment of Quince.
- Merged a bugfix for ORA.
- Merged a bugfix for importing courses with legacy discussions.
- Approved Fix: ORA response with attached file (for master).
- Replied to forum question.
- Nominated self to expand CC rights to include edx-platform.
4. What do you plan to work on in the upcoming sprint?
- Starting the Aspects documentation tickets.
- Following up on PR delays.
- Reviewing Conference talks proposals.
- Looking at Hackathons for Core sprints.
- Plans to start putting together a survey to send out to all CC’s for feedback on our processes.
- Fixing the persistent grades issue.
- Backporting recently-merged PRs to Quince, if necessary.
- Redwood release planning.
- A pair of PRs that will restore xBlock Aside functionality. This was lost in the move to the course authoring MFE.
5. What went well this sprint?
- It was a calm sprint - could do outstanding work
- Deploying Quince went well - can’t say that it’s bug-free, but there were no major snags.
Questions or comments?
Please add any questions or comments you might have below. We’d love to hear from you!
And if you’d like to take a peek at the full report, see it on Listaflow.