Contributors Meetup Async Update - January 6th - January 19th, 2024

Working Groups Core Contributors
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Core Contributor Update: Jan 5th - Jan 19th, 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

  • 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

:arrow_down: Past meeting notes 2023-12-13 Meeting notes

  • 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

  • Axim’s picking up the frontend deprecation project (which we last discussed here in 18 May 2023) in earnest, for a December 2024 delivery. Would love a braindump from folks about this.
  • Created [DEPR]: EDX_API_KEY #34039.
  • The main effort behind [DEPR]: USE-JWT-COOKIE header #371 is nearly complete.

: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: RĂ©gis Behmo

:paperclip: Latest news

  • Cristhian AndrĂ©s GarcĂ­a: Hello Devops! We have found an issue with multiple openedx installations related to Redis constantly being filled up. The source of the problem is the namespace course_structure which is used as a read through cache for the course information. However those keys doesn’t have TTL and tutor doesn’t configure the maxmemory Redis parameter so there is no eviction enabled as there is in the corresponding memcached.Also, the key format is course_structure.{db}.{version_id}which is not reutilized (overwritten) ever. So for course version there is a key in redis that stores the whole course information and those can even be of 2 mb each.Does anyone else experienced this issue?Should tutor provide a configuration parameter for the maxmemory and eviction policy for Redis?

:memo: Meeting notes

1.7. Educators Working Group

Chair: @john_curricume

:arrow_down: Past meeting notes 2023-12-18 Educator WG

  • Goals:
  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

:arrow_right: Next meeting: January 29th 2024

:memo: Meeting notes

Blockers or Calls/offers for help

  • Looking for any and all documentors!

1.8. Frontend Working Group

Chair: @arbrandes

: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.

:arrow_right: Next meeting: January 25th 2024

:memo: Meeting notes

1.9. Large Instances Working Group

Chair: @braden & @Felipe

  • Updates from each org on the call - 2U, eduNEXT, OpenCraft, Raccoon Gang
    • 2U:
      • Adam Blackwell has two announcements: (1) He is leaving 2U, and (2) 2U has open sourced their helm charts repo GitHub - edx/helm-charts: Helm charts for edx.org . It’s open source but not accepting contributions. Some pieces of this Helm chart don’t work well for Studio/LMS because of issues with codejail, but we hope to separate it in the future to run codejail separately. But it works well for other IDAs.
    • Racoon Gang:
      • Maksim Sokolskiy mostly been on holidays. But they have worked on an interesting customization related to bulk processing of student answers. Tested on a big exam and further testing is in progress. Hoping to present to the community later this year. The issue they were trying to solve is that specialized exams that get a lot of students answering at the same time would overload the database.
    • OpenCraft:
      • Gábor Boros opened a few Harmony PRs over the previous weeks, and most of them still need reviewers. Please review one if you’re interested.
    • Edunext:
      • Felipe Montoya : working on ElasticSearch issue but otherwise been mostly on holiday. Jhony Avella we also had to apply one fix to the Harmony release workflow, as there was an issue where Helm comments are not compatible with the OCI repository. We got it fixed though and now it’s working again.
    • Harmony project updates: Review list of PRs and issues, and assign anything un-assigned: There are four open PRs: Pull requests · openedx/openedx-k8s-harmony

Blockers or Calls/offers for help

  • Is anyone familiar with AWS Aurora “parallel queries”? Wondering if it will help us with handling more simultaneous users.

:memo: Meeting notes

1.10. Marketing Working Group

Chair: Eden Huthmacher

:paperclip: Latest news

  • 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

: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

  • 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 Jan 19th - Async update
  • Tuesday Jan 23rd - 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 6 - Jan 19, 2024

Here’s a snapshot of our last CC sprint…

:stopwatch: Core Contributor Hours

Slight glitch… the Listaflow reminder emails weren’t sent this month. But nevertheless, we still had 12 Core Contributors fill in the Sprint Check-in :slight_smile: Thank you!


There was a total of 101 hours of contributions reported, which is 41 hours more than the previous sprint of 60 hours.

6-19-productivity

The overall checklist response rate was 18% for this sprint, which is a 6% decline from last sprint. The previous 4 sprints saw an average of about 24% in response rate.

6-19-response-rate
6-19-response-rate1292Ă—498 28.1 KB

:notebook_with_decorative_cover: Summary of Responses

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

@antoviaque

  • A direct quote from Xavier: “A sad week for the project, with many great members of the community from 2U exiting it. We need to consider the consequences for the project and the community. It will inevitably require the rest of us in the community to step up to pick some of the work up. It could be a good occasion to revise old status quos to follow good practices.”

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

  • No answers

3. What did you accomplish this sprint?

@jill

@Cassie

  • spent quite a bit of time on various administrative tasks related to the CC user list in Listaflow, causing a knock-on effect in confirming who is a CC, and who isn’t. It also allowed me to add CCs that haven’t been added to the Wiki CC List. One CC also gave me a bit of feedback on the CC onboarding which I’ll relay to the CC WG
  • created the CC Sprint Check In form
  • working on the Graded Discussion spec, and have received feedback from ASU to descope and refine

@mafermazu

  • proposed a talk, and reviewed talks for the Open edX conference
  • help in Discuss
  • worked to improve the WooCommerce Open edX plugin

@xitij2000

  • reviewed frontend-app-course-authoring PRs
  • reviewed cs_comment_service PR

@antoviaque

@Angie_Ruiz

  • scrapped the list of the Open edX sites showing which initiatives are active and valuable
  • made a video for the conference

@braden

  • researched and worked on improving type safety of frontend code

@ali_hugo

  • drafted questions for a CC survey
  • submitted a conference talk proposal
  • attended the Core Product and UX/UI meetings

4. What do you plan to work on in the upcoming sprint?

@Cassie

  • refining the Graded Discussions Spec

@antoviaque

  • upstreaming onboarding course - Prepare interview & async sprint
  • prepare TOC presentation for Meetup
  • follow up on PR Delays
  • discovery for Open edX Handbook
  • review draft questions of the CC Survey
  • compile TOC notes

@ali_hugo

@jill

  • working on Aspects documentation and bugfixes as they arise.

@mafermazu

  • improve the WooCommerce Open edX plugin
  • participate more in the Conference planning

5. What went well this sprint?

@jill

@antoviaque

  • old topics and issues being sorted out this sprint, like the release planning.

: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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