Contributors Meetup Async Update - November 11th, 2023 - November 24th, 2023

Working Groups Core Contributors
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Core Contributor Update: Nov 11th - Nov 24th, 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 2023-10-31 CC Working Group Meeting Notes
  • Debugging persistent grade issues
  • Open edX Survey Report
  • How do we make sure strings in frontend-app-communications are sent to Transifex?
    • 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. Adolfo Brandes has context on this issue and will investigate.
    • Related bugs and Slack threads:
  • MFEs for Quince
    • Learner dashboard MFE future is uncertain. They’re still figuring out what to do about it. The idea is to get it ready for Quince
  • Outdated MFEs
    • From the last frontend meeting: “Many MFEs are stuck an old FE platform version because of breaking changes.”
      • Adolfo talked about the challenges of keeping MFs up to date, particularly due to breaking changes in upgrades. Adolfo expressed hope that these issues could be solved with the help of Piral down the line (cf draft OEP-65).
  • MFEs documentation & reviews
    • From a September sprint update:
      • “Identify MFEs and new repos earlier and review the processes for enabling them. Advocate for better documentation and easier configuration while there’s still time to make changes.”
    • Adolfo mentioned that there is a list of requirements for an MFE in the wiki, which is being used to check the Learner dashboard against.
    • Adolfo outlined the current process for introducing a new MFE:
      • It includes a long-lived ticket with requirements (example) and an implicit review process. He suggested that the ownership of these issues could be better handled by someone more product-focused, as they could coordinate translation efforts and features.
      • The ultimate test for a new MFE is through BTR, where a plugin is made for the MFE and added to the Test Plan.

:memo: Meeting notes

1.3. Data Working Group

Chair: @e0d & @blarghmatey

:paperclip: Latest news

  • Funded Contribution Updates:
    • New ClickHouse / Superset expert in the works to do schema / performance review and security pass
      • Possibility to re-contract with Rory and/or add another person to work on reports as v1 requirements land
  • Aspects product updates:
    • Updates on stakeholder interviews, common themes, and plans to move Aspects forward
      Respondents so far:
      • Manage 100-400 courses on Open edX for 10-10k learners
      • Use analytic data to improve course content, assessments, enrollment rates, inter- and intra-course recommendations, and learner outcomes.
      • Current pain points: difficult to know where learner activity is happening in a course, identifying and targeting communication to at-risk learners
      • Commonly requested learner demographic data (geography, gender, age)
      • Commonly requested visualizations: heat maps, scatter plots.
      • Interesting requests: identifying common questions from forum posts, content/video segments that learners revisit
      • Some use cases may drive non-Aspects work.
    • Igor Degtiarov raised “leaderboard” and “learner inactivity” reports for motivating learners.
  • Aspects technical updates:
    • Localization is in, waiting for translations!
    • Load test tooling is being worked on to support large scale testing
    • Help text updates
    • Fixes to problem event parsing
  • Event bus discussion pt 2:
    • Tracking events are coming to the the bus, Cristhian Garcia has landed the first PR, one more to go
      • Then an additional PR for event-routing-backends / Aspects to be able to use it
    • Interesting conversation with WGU about using the bus for analytics
    • Hoping for a temperature check with a larger group about whether folks are interested in adopting the bus, and for what purposes

:memo: Meeting notes

1.4. DEPR Working Group

Chair: @feanil

:paperclip: Latest news

  • Admin note: can someone run the 30 November meeting?
    • It seems like this
  • courseware_studentmodule work
  • Do we have a process for removing code that we don’t think is actually accessed from the frontend?
    • Just go through the DEPR process as normal
    • For 2U-checking, we have ways to do some observability work to check for whether or not codepaths are used.
  • Improve DEPR process for toggles · Issue #283 · openedx/edx-toggles
    • Covered if we want to require the toggle_depr_ticket field.
  • Likely incoming DEPRs for obscure video features.
    • New version of the video player
    • Will need to communicate out within 2U and 2U partners
    • Can we check for New Relic information about usage?
  • Bok Choy update:
    • We’re getting closer and closer to removing bok choy from openedx
  • Python 3.11
    • Targeting Redwood
    • Hoping to start this in January

:memo: Meeting notes

1.5. DevEx Working Group

Chair: @Rebecca_S_Graber & @kmccormick

:paperclip: Latest news

Blockers or Calls/offers for help

: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

  • Lessons from Language MOOCs, Dr. Haohsiang Lao, Director of the Chinese Language Program at MIT
    MITx - Chinese Language in Culture
    • 4 skills in learning a foreign language:
      • Speaking
      • Reading
      • Listening
      • Writing
    • Elements of the MITx Chinese Language courses
      • Storytelling – keeps good amount of returning students
      • Linked textbooks with MOOC course
      • Live sessions - 3 live sessions per week
      • Drill session
    • Course involves three types of videos:
      • Animation video
      • “Real-world” conversational video
      • Lecture video
    • Fact VS Act
      • Fact – students can do self study, we put it into the materials that the students can study on their own
      • Act – drill session or live session
    • Appearance of chatGPT – ChatGPT can act as guide for speaking and writing skills
    • Microsoft Edge – has a wide variety of pronunciation variations, it provides at least 12 versions of native speaker
  • Polling for Future sessions: Jamboard shared to determine future priorities: Educators WG 11/13 - Google Jamboard

: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 2023-11-09 Frontend Working Group Meeting Notes:
  • Deprecated code removal from edx-platform:
    • Account, profile, and some ecommerce pages
  • Breakages at 2U:
    • An internal template override (for a reverse() url) broke edx-platform
  • Should we announce before removal? Or should we add it to a planned release?
  • Could it have been caught by CI?
    • No, because it is an internal override
  • Should we support this kind of override in the first place?
    • Probably not.
  • We should just follow OEP-21, but since it’s taken so long for this particular DEPR ticket, an announcement in the forum would be corteous
  • Also, since edx-platform doesn’t have a proper CHANGELOG, make sure to flag commits with BREAKING CHANGE or !, and that will help the release notes author noticing it.
  • Renovate auto-rebase?
  • Do we need Renovate to auto-rebase stale PRs? (See frontend-platform.) It’s generating a lot of noise (because maintainers aren’t doing anything about them). (Slack thread.)
    • We should disable this across all repos. If individual maintainers feel the need to, they can re-enable it.

:memo: Meeting notes

1.9. Large Instances Working Group

Chair: @braden & @Felipe

:paperclip: Latest news

:memo: Meeting notes

1.10. Marketing Working Group

Chair: Eden Huthmacher

:paperclip: Latest news

  • NAU Tender
    • deadline to submit a bid - Nov 23rd.
    • Tender doc: FCT - Tender.docx
  • Open edX website updates
    • Removed Marketplace tab
    • Open edX Provider info listed under “Get Started” tab (#1 clicked based on GA)
    • GA update re website changes - Nicole Kessler
  • 2024 Open edX Conference
  • Next Open edX meetup on the 16th of October 2023 featuring multi-lingual and continuing education platform use (presenters: Artistanbul, Wikimedia, and SilverTech)
  • OKR Review (starting at item 1): OKR´S MWG

: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

  • Tuesday Nov 28th - Join the meetup here!
  • Friday Dec 8th - Async update
  • 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.