Contributors Meetup Async Update - December 9th, 2023 - December 22nd, 2023

Working Groups Core Contributors
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Core Contributor Update: Dec 9th - Dec 22nd, 2023

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

  1. Working Groups Updates
  2. Events
  3. Projects
  4. Next async update and meetup

1. Working Groups Updates

Working Groups Calendar

1.1. BTR Working Group

Chair: @jalondonot

:paperclip: Latest news

:memo: Meeting notes

1.2. Contributor Coordination Working Group

Chair: Jorge Londoño

:paperclip: Latest news

  • :arrow_down: Past meeting notes 2023-11-28 CC Working Group Meeting Notes
  • Debugging persistent grade issues: Last meeting, Dave Ormsbee (Axim) offered to connect with Peter Pinch later to check on the issue
  • Follow-up - How do we make sure strings in frontend-app-communications are sent to Transifex?
  • MFEs documentation & reviews
    • Action items from the last meeting:
    • Product working group should be involved, so that it’s not just a technical decision to include a MFE
    • BTR should be involved to validate that the MFE should be accepted or not
    • To help increasing the cross-over between working groups (such as BTR and product), it would help to do more async communication, which would help to include members of other groups in discussions, without having to attend many meetings or monitoring many Slack channels.
  • Product & UX meeting
    • Last core contributors update: “The Paragon Working Group would like to get members of the Product Working Group (and others in the community) more involved in UX discussions. This will allow individuals outside of 2U, not only to keep tabs on design updates, but also to help guide the design of Open edX. The idea is to start a cross-functional meeting for context/knowledge sharing around design. Anyone interested in getting involved?”
    • Previous core contributors update: Discussions about setting up a betatester program

:memo: Meeting notes

1.3. Data Working Group

Chair: @e0d & @blarghmatey

:paperclip: Latest news

  • Aspects tech updates:
    • Load test updates
    • Schema management updates
    • PII retirement
    • Upcoming work: data lifecycles
  • Insights deprecation:
    • Brian Mesick: It seems like there’s renewed desire to move Insights our to pasture. I’d like to get a temperature check among the group, depending on who shows up, and start putting the word out.

:memo: Meeting notes

1.4. DEPR Working Group

Chair: @feanil

:paperclip: Latest news

  • Deprecation of insights:
  • Jeremy: MySQL 8! Is there anything 5.7-specific we can ditch?
    • We can drop the migration tests in GitHub because we don’t need them yet
    • No new LTS for MySQL yet
    • Hooray! We are just happy that we are now current and up to date!
    • Jeremy will ask Arbi-BOM to update the Support Windows doc
  • Jeremy: APM integration deprecation/generalization
    • We should create a DEPR ticket for New Relic
    • be clear that we aren’t going to be adding a direct replacement
    • Trying to target OpenTelemetry as a starting point for this refactoring work
    • A chance to try to ensure that there are the proper integration points for orgs/operators to build out their own observability stacks

:memo: Meeting notes

1.5. DevEx Working Group

Chair: @Rebecca_S_Graber & @kmccormick

:paperclip: Latest news

:memo: Meeting notes

1.6. DevOps Working Group

Chair: RĂ©gis Behmo

:paperclip: Latest news

  • Shubham Nagpal says: Hi Team Please provide you assiatance on How can I overcome the challenge of implementing path-level security in Open edX with EKS, considering that a classic load balancer doesn’t offer this feature, i can block the ips throught ACL but not the path is there any work arround.

:memo: Meeting notes

1.7. Educators Working Group

Chair: @john_curricume

:paperclip: Latest news

  1. Capture snapshot of current community use of generative AI
  2. Capture concerns and interests of the community with respect to AI
  3. Understand what the community would like to learn about AI this year.
  • Here you can find the Poll Results

: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

  • :arrow_down: Past meeting notes 2023-12-07 Frontend Working Group Meeting Notes
  • Paragon Upgrade and Other Scope Changes: Need help with the scope updates, how can I engage Fed-BOM and others to help? We need to update package.json @edx/paragon it uses @openedx/paragon and upgrades to the latest version.
  • Shout-out to Piral preso on this week’s FSG: If you’re interested in Piral and how we’re thinking of using it, check out the recording.

:memo: Meeting notes

1.9. Large Instances Working Group

Chair: @braden & @Felipe

:paperclip: Latest news

  • Updates from each org on the call - 2U, eduNEXT, OpenCraft, Raccoon Gang
    • 2U:
      • Some progress on the evalutation of devspace. Not much to report there.
        The codejail in k8s evaluation is looking like it will use a VM to host a django version of edunext’s codejail service.
      • Jeremy will publish findings in the ticket.
    • OpenCraft:
      • reviewed the open PR. Gabor’s PR is waiting for review and Jhony will assign time this sprint.
    • Edunext:
      • current focus on reducing cloud use by switching to spot instances.
        base nodes on demand - rest on spot instances.
    • Emad:
      • Nothing to report. The PR that Gabor reviewed is merged. Some of the multitenant issue for ES remains open as
        multitenancy ES only works when there are no other tutor plugins present that also connect to ES.
  • Open issues:
    • The multitenant ES and the next steps for the harmony project remain open. Gabor will write some of the topics that are of interest to opencraft and Moises will add some from edunext’s side.

:memo: Meeting notes

1.10. Marketing Working Group

Chair: Eden Huthmacher

:paperclip: Latest news

:memo: Meeting notes

1.11. Maintainers

Chair: Edward Zarecor

:paperclip: Latest news

:memo: Meeting notes

1.12. Product Working Group

Chair: Jenna Makowski

:paperclip: Latest news

:memo: Meeting notes

1.13. Security Working Group

Chair: Feanil Patel

:paperclip: Latest news

:memo: Meeting notes

1.14. TOC

Chair: Ed Zarecor

:paperclip: Latest news

Executive Summary

  • TOC Membership Changes: Virginia Fletcher replaces Julie Davis (2U), Samuel Paccoud (FUN) leaves
  • Conference Plans: Announcement imminent, the conference will be held later than usual
  • Mobile App Development: After the TOC approved to adopt the Raccoon Gang apps as the official mobile apps, progress has been made. There was a kick-off meetings with 2U and Raccoon Gang, as well as a comprehensive gap analysis.
  • Maintenance Funding: Discussed better spreading maintenance funding burden, as most currently falls on 2U, prompting discussions about the distribution of workload within the community. Opportunities for non-profit organizations to take on certain maintenance tasks were discussed.
  • Elected Representatives’ Term Extension: The TOC proposed and agreed to extend the representative term from one to two years to ensure representatives have sufficient time to be productive. Implementation starts with the current 2024 election.
  • Election Nominations: The TOC reviewed and approved the candidates for the 2024 community elections.
  • Front End Plugability Summit: A Front End Plugability Summit will be organized with the intent to resolve difficulties in adapting the front end to business-specific needs. Recommendations from the summit will be presented to the TOC.
  • Pull Request Review Delays: Significant delays in pull request reviews are hampering certain projects. Proposals were made to improve this situation, including expanding the core contributor program and improving pull request monitoring.
  • Forum Thread Discussions Summary: Various proposals were raised in the community forum, including expanding the maintainer program, involving edX/2U employees, improving pull request monitoring, and creating lighter roles for contributors.
  • Core Issues: Overburdened repository maintainers, misalignment with organizational use cases, and lack of predictability for external contributors were identified as significant problems. Having multiple reviewers and defining core repositories were proposed as solutions.
  • Stats: The core contributors’ capacity was summarized, with about 50 active contributors performing between 200 and 300 hours of work every two weeks.
  • Root Cause Analysis: Ancient project biases, late proposal reviews, the shift from proprietary to open, and the continuous delivery of repositories were identified as root causes of the issues.
  • Encouraging Participation in the Core Contributor Program: Issues were raised about the perceived value and benefits of becoming a core contributor, especially for those who already have merge access. Identifying platform parts that can be kept internally was suggested to accelerate velocity.
  • Open Source Project Deployment and Contribution: Proposals for managing automatic deployments from pull requests were explored. A reference version from the community’s standpoint was suggested.
  • Next Steps: The meeting agreed on creating a catalog of potential changes, pushing for earlier product reviews, improving the extension points and the platform’s plugability, identifying core repositories, encouraging community involvement and contribution, and exploring ways to clarify the open-source project’s social contract. The feasibility of delegated reviews and automatic deployment by 2U was to be discussed internally.

:memo: Meeting notes

1.15. Translation Working Group

Chair: Eden Huthmacher

:paperclip: Latest news

:memo: Meeting notes

2. Events

  • We are excited to announce the 2024 Open edX conference! The conference will be held at Stellenbosch University in Cape Town, South Africa and will take place between July 2nd and July 5th, 2024. Register here to secure your seat!
  • 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 Dec 22th - Async update
  • Tuesday Nov 26th - Join the meetup here!
  • Details and draft agenda on Confluence

: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 recap!

Btw there are some working groups without news or meeting notes for a while, like the DevOps, maintainers, or security working groups – @regis @e0d @feanil How can we learn more about what is happening in the groups?

@Natalia_Choconta For product, @jmakowski can correct me but I think that while the scrum of scrum hasn’t happened in a while, it’s worth looking at the subgroups, like the core product working group. There haven’t been too many notes posted though - @jmakowski is there a page which allows to follow the activity of the product working group, besides the scrum of scrum meeting notes at https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/COMM/pages/3754459513/Product+Monthly+Scrum+of+Scrums?

For the TOC, we need to prepare the notes of the December meeting @e0d - happy to help on this.

@Dean We also need to post the core contributors checkins/updates from December to start addressing those - let me know if you need help?

Also @Eden_Huthmacher @ehuthmacher there was a meeting of the Marketing working group on Dec 20th but I don’t think it got notes posted; since I receive the automated Otter transcript summary I’ve posted it at https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/COMM/pages/3987046402/Meeting+of+December+20th+2024

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Btw, @Eden_Huthmacher @ehuthmacher I see that the Otter account used by the marketing working group is in limited free trial; if you want I could get our paid Otter account at OpenCraft to join the meeting, it would produce a complete transcript and summary.

Same offer to all other working groups btw! Having Otter joining all working groups meetings could be a good way to ensure we always have a transcript and summary of all meetings, to allow to follow async more easily (though the best remains to have someone at least reviewing the notes afterwards to improve them). @jalondonot @e0d @blarghmatey @feanil @Rebecca_S_Graber @kmccormick @regis @john_curricume @arbrandes @braden @Felipe @Eden_Huthmacher @jmakowski

I might send the bot to some of the meetings to test it a bit more, unless you think it’s a bad idea :slight_smile:

Related to Async working group updates - News section · Issue #112 · openedx/wg-coordination · GitHub

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Thank you Xavier! We posted the notes here: https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/COMM/pages/3949822475/Agenda+December+20th+2023

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@antoviaque Yes, it would be great if we can use your Otter for both the Translation and Marketing WG. Thank you! And happy New Year!! :slight_smile:

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@ehuthmacher Ah, thanks for the link! The page was a couple of levels down in the section, under an earlier meeting, so it wasn’t immediately visible - I’ve moved the agenda page to the root of the agendas section, and moved the summary I had added to another page to it, to have it all in one place.

And sounds good for the Otter, will do - let me know if that doesn’t work as intended, or if you can’t find the summary after or during the call.

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No objections from the FWG! Google Meet provides a literal transcript, but it seems Otter summarizes the meeting, which can be more useful.

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@arbrandes I tried to get the Otter bot to join the front-end meeting, but it didn’t seem to be able to join it to take the notes:

image

Did you see it at all trying to join the meeting?

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Nope, haven’t seen it, but I think it might be because - for some unintentional reason - each attendee from outside the org needs to be let in manually. I’ll check the event configuration to see if I can turn that off.

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@arbrandes It worked this time! :+1:

Btw, to everyone who is in meetings joined by the Otter bots, don’t hesitate to report it if you find issues - either here, or opening a ticket in the wg-coordination repository. We have for example heard of rumors of Otter joining meetings without being invited - we haven’t seen it on our side, so we would be interested in more details.