Contributors Meetup Async Update - January 20th - February 2nd, 2024

Working Groups Core Contributors
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Core Contributor Update: Jan 20th - Feb 2nd, 2024

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

:memo: Meeting notes

1.2. Contributor Coordination Working Group

Chair: Jorge Londoño

:arrow_down: Past meeting notes 2024-01-09 CC Working Group Meeting Notes

  • The team discussed the importance of conducting a survey to gather feedback and adjusting their timeline or strategy based on the response rate. They also touched upon a working group document and the need for improved coordination and information sharing among the team. Later, Adolfo mentioned the introduction of new MSPs and the problems reported, with Jenna and the product team leading the initiative. The aim is to clarify what will be included in the Redwood product and what won’t, with a focus on ensuring all features are ready in time. An action item was identified in a ticket, which Adolfo confirmed was already being addressed. Towards the end of the meeting, Xavier emphasized the need for technical coordination of a project.
  • Next steps
    • Xavier and eduNEXT will consider working on creating a simple, smaller communication tool handbook for the community.
    • eduNEXT and Adolfo will reach out to Neil to see where he stands on the project.
    • Cassie will follow up with Ali about the UX working group joining the project working group meeting.
    • Ed will add the sprints discussion to the agenda for the kickoff of the Maintenance and Upgrade Working Group.
    • EduNEXT will work on creating a handbook for asynchronous communication with Xavier.

:memo: Meeting notes

1.3. Data Working Group

Chair: @e0d & @blarghmatey

  • Aspects V1 Product Requirement Document in progress:
    • Currently in progress, I will present in a future Data Working Group meeting once it’s fully finalized, but here is a link to the Work in Progress PRD in the meantime: Aspects V1: Product Requirements
    • Walked participants through the layout of the document, highlighting the scope of this initial release and touched on one key difference between Insights and Aspects after V1 will be the inclusion of Individual Learner and Learner Group data
    • Please take a look and add any comments and questions you may have, and we’ll go over the requirements in detail in a future Data WG.

:memo: Meeting notes

1.4. DEPR Working Group

Chair: @feanil

:memo: Meeting notes

1.5. DevEx Working Group

Chair: @Rebecca_S_Graber & @kmccormick

:arrow_down: Past meeting notes 2023-12-04 DevEx Meetup Notes

:memo: Meeting notes

1.6. DevOps Working Group

Chair: Régis Behmo

:paperclip: Latest news

Announcement: The DevX Working Group is dissolved! :boom:

Announcement: Join the Tutor Users’ Group :handshake:

  • It’s become clear that there is an acute need to support new Tutor users and plugin developers. It’s also clear that Tutor maintainers benefit from hearing feedback from people who are using the tool.
    So, Kyle will host one-hour users’ group every other week for sharing help, tips, and feedback on using Tutor and developing Tutor plugins. Bring your questions, and get ready for some live debugging! Expert or newbie, all are welcome.

:memo: Meeting notes

1.7. Educators Working Group

Chair: @john_curricume

  • Documentation Update
    • Challenge: Moving contents over - fixing the links (both internal and external)
    • Here you can find the Poll Results
  • Designing Games to the Learning Objectives and Getting Them Built
    1. What are the core tenets of good game design?
    • Intrinsic motivation
    • Extrinsic motivation
    1. How are educational games different? How are they the same?
    • You cannot have a good game of educational robots without embracing the fact that to challenge learners they have to fail to be motivated which is very different from your standard educational exercise.
    • When you design an activity. The idea isn’t like how we’re going to make them fail here until they get it right. It’s you want them to complete it and see what they’ve learned most of the time.
    • With games, if there’s not enough of a challenge, the game is not fun, and players will stop playing. But certainly, if there’s too much of a challenge, the players will give up and stop playing. So you have to strike that balance between kind of challenge and success. This is by concept called gameplay loop - a fundamental way that you can break down a game and continually motivate players.
    1. How do we build games that meet our learning objectives? And when do we choose games over other mediums?
    • Keep learning objectives relatively simple to accomplish when building your games, and keep gameplay fun and intuitive.
    • Decrease the on-ramp, and how much people need to engage with them to succeed.
    • Keep it elegant, the fewer moving parts, the better.
  • The process of getting the game developed as a semi-technical learning designer.
    • Game maker studio. It can output HTML. 5. It’s not particularly good. HTML. 5. It’s not particularly good code, but you can use it for prototyping.

:memo: Meeting notes

Blockers or Calls/offers for help

  • Looking for any and all documentors!

1.8. Frontend Working Group

Chair: @arbrandes

  • Front-end maintenance, e-commerce, and frontend app development.
    • Adolfo encourages volunteers to maintain repositories.
    • Front-end app payment and e-commerce are being re-evaluated for Redwood.
    • Adolfo discusses ongoing pluggability work, with three PRs in flight for the front end.
  • Improving release process and developer experience.
    • Brian Smith and Adolfo discuss the importance of testing and development, with a focus on improving the release process.
    • They emphasize the need for more MFE development in Tutor to catch pain points and make the development environment better for MFEs.
    • Developers should prioritize building for the entire community, not just their specific needs.
  • Contributing to Open edX project.
    • Brian Smith and Adolfo discuss moving courses from the “edx” namespace to the “openedx” namespace.
    • Yagnesh expresses interest in contributing to the project and working as a maintainer.
    • Brian Smith explains nomination process for core contributors, while Yagnesh seeks guidance on becoming a maintainer.
  • Open edX contributor roles and responsibilities.
    • Brian Smith explains the process of becoming a core contributor in the community: nominations are made on the forums, and once the nomination period ends, the access to merge PRs is granted.
    • Adolfo clarifies that core contributor status comes with the responsibility of reviewing and merging PRs, but not necessarily coding or programming skills are required.
    • Adolfo suggests contributing to an existing repository to become a core contributor.

:memo: Meeting notes

1.9. Large Instances Working Group

Chair: @braden & @Felipe

  • Updates from each org on the call - 2U, eduNEXT, OpenCraft, Raccoon Gang
    • Racoon Gang:
      • Our team will be looking at issues and PRs on the Harmony project. In particular, interested in the Velero PR - Add optional Velero chart by gabor-boros · Pull Request #58 · openedx/openedx-k8s-harmony. Re Aspects: We’ve integrated Aspects into one of our client installation and will be testing it on stage and hopefully soon in prod. So far everything seems great. We’ll monitor performance and operation. One strange thing: in the LMS we have an xAPI forwarder and there is another piece that pulls logs from k8s pods, but I can’t understand what this is doing. It seems to scrape the stdout logs from all containers but not be used anywhere. Wondering if this is from legacy architecture?
        Investigating speeding up MFE build using Bun or pnpm instead of npm, and having a base build with light MFE overrides rather than rebuilding the whole thing.
        Discussion: Braden MacDonald mentioned on a previous call that you can build an MFE using random values for the config and then make it use ‘sed’ to replace those values in the compiled .js bundle with environment values at container startup. Moisés González shared that they used this approach a bit in GitHub - eduNEXT/tutor-contrib-mfe-extensions: Experimental Tutor Plugin for CDN support and extras .
    • OpenCraft:
      • Braden MacDonald - just continuing slowly to move pieces of internal “Grove” hosting management tool over to Harmony.
    • Edunext:
      • working on Harmony project.
      • Felipe Montoya and Moisés González were contacted by Tim from 2U to see how their codejail implementation could align with eduNEXT’s. eduNEXT helped 2U solve their issue, and now they’re using a similar approach but not the same code. e.g. eduNEXT uses Flask but 2U is using Django. Now that this is unblocked, they may be containerizing LMS/CMS soon at 2U.
        Deployed Aspects and have it connected to an Olive installation, and it seems to be running well. This is a good sign for use of Aspects in production in the future.
    • Harmony project updates:
      • ElasticSearch/OpenSearch - it would be good to investigate this and standardize on one or the other for Harmony, so we don’t have to do twice as much work. Braden MacDonald from a dev perspective, the API is largely compatible so the edx-search/platform code should work with one or the other. So it’s more of an operations question. Moisés González points out that they may differ in terms of multitenancy support, and that some orgs have a license/legal requirement to use OpenSearch only. Maybe we can continue to support ES for now since it’s so common, but if edx-search is changed to only support OpenSearch or to use some OpenSearch APIs, we’ll drop support for ES in Harmony and/or make OpenSearch the default. TODO: need to research this more.
      • Implementing Redis Cluster - Maksim Sokolskiy wonders if anyone has experience using AWS ElastiCache Redis as a cluster (in “serverless” mode). (Using it as a cluster requires changes to the configuration and driver used in edx-platform.) So far if they switch from hosted Redis to AWS cluster, it simply doesn’t work. They’re seeing the error “redis.exceptions.ResponseError: CROSSSLOT Keys in request don’t hash to the same slot”. Does anyone have experience with this?
        Moisés González is also wondering if anyone has experience with Redis filling up and causing errors.

:memo: Meeting notes

1.10. Marketing Working Group

Chair: Eden Huthmacher

:arrow_down: Past meeting notes 2024-01-17 MWG Meeting Notes:

  • Open edX Conference 2024
    • CFP is closing today - please submit a proposal , if you have not done so
    • BizDev Workshop
      • Participants: Appsembler, Abstract Technology, OpenCraft, eduNEXT, edSPIRIT, and Edly by Arbisoft
      • Topics: Open edX LMS global market standing (compared to its competitors), consumer feedback & buyer personas, analysis of the Open edX roadmap and alignment with consumer demand
  • Next Open edX Meetup
    • Use case of public universities in Egypt adopting the Open edX platform, as well as AI tools integrated into the platform for content creation, and updates on the latest Open edX release, Quince
    • Register here: Open edX Use Cases & Latest Software Release
  • Open edX Provider page updates + Experience Cloud Updates
  • OKR Strategy Review

:memo: Meeting notes

1.11. Maintainers

Chair: Edward Zarecor

:arrow_down: Past meeting notes 2023-09-07 Maintainers’ Meeting notes:

:memo: Meeting notes

1.12. Product Working Group

Chair: Jenna Makowski

:arrow_down: Past meeting notes 2023-10-03 Product Meeting notes:

  • UX/UI Working Group
    • Tagging feature: The people we wanted to contact to do usability testing did not respond and we were not able to do the testing.
  • Mobile Working Group

:memo: Meeting notes

1.13. Security Working Group

Chair: Feanil Patel

:arrow_down: Past meeting notes 2023-07-26 Security WG Meeting

:memo: Meeting notes

1.14. TOC

Chair: Ed Zarecor

:arrow_down: Past meeting summary 2023-10-10 TOC Meeting Summary

:memo: Meeting notes

1.15. Translation Working Group

Chair: Eden Huthmacher

:arrow_down: Past meeting notes 2024-01-17 Translation WG Meeting notes

  • Review language performances: Translation Working Group
  • Status of OEP-58 and transition to from edx-platform project to openedx-translations project - what is the timing?
  • If it takes another release then MFE’s need to be shifted to the edx-platform project
  • Leverage translation memory to ensure smooth transition (strings should be added as reviewed in the migration)
  • Aspen strings are embedded in the openedx-translations project only.
  • for Quince, work out of the Quince Release project, for Redwood, openedx-translations project
  • will run a sync today between edx-platform and openedx-translation project
  • Simlink strategy - Please update entry for your dedicated languages - what about browser languages such as en.MX Relevant doc: Language Codes - TX WG -Simlink Strategy

: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 Feb 16th - Async update
  • Tuesday Feb 20th - 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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Core Contributor Check-in: Jan 20 - Feb 2, 2024

:stopwatch: Core Contributor Hours

We had the best response EVER to our sprint check-in! A whopping 29 Core Contributors :slight_smile: You guys are legends.


Before I get into it, I just want to mention that filling in Listaflow CC Check-in helps identify issues, blockers, and collaboration opportunities, whilst also aggregating total Core Contributor hours. In turn it allows us to showcase our contributions and accomplishments to the broader community.

Okay, let’s get to it. Here’s a snapshot of our last CC sprint…

There was a total of 532.75 hours of contributions reported, which is 431.75 hours more than the previous sprint of 101 hours. Amazing stuff!

Sprint Productivity
Sprint Productivity1334×630 33.1 KB

The overall checklist response rate was 45% for this sprint, which is a 27% increase from last sprint.

Response Rate
Response Rate1254×494 29.3 KB

:notebook_with_decorative_cover: Summary of Responses

1. Do you need any help? Or is there anything you’d like to collaborate on?

@john_curricume

@Glib_Glugovskiy

  • Needs faster reviews in the course-authoring MFE
  • Needs more input on reviews in credentials repository (Credly badges integration)

@antoviaque

  • Needs more uptake on maintenance! See this post

@pdpinch

2. What should we improve? Are there any blockers?

@Glib_Glugovskiy

  • Improve the pace of the review cycle in course-authoring repository for the Course Unit page transition into MFE

@antoviaque

  • Wants to discuss the volume of contributions to maintenance as a community. He’d like the community to get more involved, and also improve practices to ensure contributing is rewarding for everyone

@john_curricume

  • Is struggling with migrating readthedocs to docs.edx.org. Lot’s of links are breaking and conflicting - he’s currently doing manual fixes. Is there a faster way?

3. What did you accomplish this sprint?

@Felipe

  • Reviewed PR openedx/openedx-events/pull/309 from a repo maintainer perspective
  • Merged, rolled, fixed and ultimately merged the PRs that allow the survey banner to be shown at /admin again
  • Regular maintenance of openedx-events through requirement updates, removing pinned dependencies and upgrading the setup.py (304, 306, 307)
  • Participated in the roadmap planning for redwood and sumac
  • Participated in the new Maintainers Working Group

@Cassie

@marcotuts

  • Joined the Open edX Roadmap planning session
  • Joined several Mobile Working Group meetings, the UX/UI and part of a Campus Working Group meetings

@Glib_Glugovskiy

  • Started reviews for Credly integration
  • Started reviews for Course Unit page in course-authoring MFE

@Zia.Fazal

  • Spent some time debugging: Issue 60 of scorm xblock
  • Reviewed PRs #64 #63 - related to scorm xblock
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3. What did you accomplish this sprint? (continued)

@antoviaque

  • Wrote and posted TOC notes from last meeting
  • Followed up on meeting about stalled OSPRs
  • Reviewed draft questions for CC Survey
  • Created list of interviewees FOSDEM & second interview for Upstreaming Course
  • Recurring:
    • monitored & posted meetings summaries & transcripts
    • followed up and answered Core sprints (async)
    • Moderated Forum

@Michelle_Philbrick

  • OSPR triage
  • Attended new Maintenance Working Group meeting

@ali_hugo

  • Provided an image and icon for the “AI/Personalized learning Tools” filter on the Open edX Marketplace page
  • Attended the UX/UI, and Core Product Working Group meetings
  • Worked on the draft of the Core Contributor survey

@mafermazu

  • Advanced with WooCommerce plugin improvements

@xitij2000

  • Reviewed frontend-app-course-authoring PRs
  • Fixed tutor for docker compose

@jill

@estebanetcheverry

  • Joined the Open edX meet up
  • Rehearsed and did live sessions Open edX conference planning meetings

@john_curricume

  • Continued with the documentation migration in preparation to have Educators Working Group build out docs
  • Joined Educators Working Group - gamification in open courses
  • Created gamification assets from Educators Working Group
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4. What do you plan to work on in the upcoming sprint?

@Felipe

  • Getting the studio home scope reviewed and approved so that PRs can be properly eng reviewed and merged
  • Pushing for the content groups ↔ teams connection

@pdpinch

  • Re-engaging with PR reviews and the Maintenance Working Group

@john_curricume

  • Continue with documentation migration in preparation for the Educators Working Group to build out docs
  • Video development discussion - Educators Working Group (Feb 12)
  • Create video assets - Educators Working Group

@jill

  • Work on more Aspects documentation: #73
  • Work on more OSPRs

@Glib_Glugovskiy

  • Start working on extending mobile API for new OeX Mobile apps
  • Finalize Studio transition into frontend-app-course-authoring

@Cassie

  • Work on Graded Discussions Estimate for ASU
  • Join Marketing Meeting - Open edX Conference 2024: Conference Planning

@antoviaque

  • Prepare TOC presentation for Meet up
  • Prepare for next TOC Meeting
  • Follow-up on OEP for escalation process to TOC
  • Edit small videos from interview - Course
  • Discovery for Open edX Handbook
  • Follow-up PR delays

@ali_hugo

  • Hopes to complete the Core Contributor Survey and start to send it out to the Community

@mafermazu

  • Continue improving the WooCommerce plugin to upload to WordPress.org

5. What went well this sprint?

@Felipe

  • Good maintenance work both in the repos that he is a maintainer of, and the new Maintenance Working Group

@ali_hugo

  • Great collaborating with Xavier and Cassie on the Core Contributor Survey!

@antoviaque

  • Good discussions about the evolution of maintenance in the platform

@jill

  • Enjoying working through the Aspects documentation TODOs: they’re a great way to round out my knowledge of the components that make up Aspects

:speech_balloon: 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 .

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@antoviaque and @ali_hugo the good news is we had more CC’s respond to the check-in (thank you Slack), but the not so great news is that I had to separate my post into three parts as I can’t @ more than 10 people at a time in a post. @sarina couldn’t find an easy way to extend my permissions. So this is just a note related to the CC Survey work we’re doing - something to consider if we continue using the forum for these type of reports :slight_smile:

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@Cassie Thanks for the ping, and for making me chuckle with that gif!

Do you know what the issue is with increasing your forum permissions?

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@ali_hugo I’m not sure. Sarina briefly looked into it and suggested I split the post to avoid the issue. If any other CC has an idea, please let me know! :slight_smile:

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Cassie has the highest permission level and I’m not sure what else to do - Googling doesn’t give me a clear answer. If someone else wants to research what we might do (we use the open-source software Discourse), feel free!

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@sarina @Cassie The setting for the max number of mentions is global, with two different maximums: one for new users, and one for confirmed users. Here is the one from OpenCraft’s forums:

image
image1680×776 65.5 KB

Imho we could put the “max mentions per post” to a high number - spam usually comes from new users, so I don’t think anyone would be negatively affected, and it would help in cases like this.

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@antoviaque thank you!! I have tried Googling that to no avail, I have changed this now :slight_smile:

Now… let’s aim for better documentation of the Open edX project :joy:

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