Core Contributor Update: Oct 28th - Nov 10th, 2023
Use the jump links below to view the section that interests you:
1. Working Groups Updates
1.1. BTR Working Group
Chair: @jalondonot
Latest news
- Deciding on the âSâ and âTâ Open edX release names
- Quince release update:
- Quince testing process: 54% of progress
- Quince Test Sheet - Google Sheets
Blockers or Calls/offers for help
frontend-app-discussionsis broken on quince.master: Reported by Ghassan Maslamani on Slack.- [Test failure] TC_LEARNER_7: Can't create an account ¡ Issue #318 ¡ openedx/wg-build-test-release ¡ GitHub
Meeting notes
1.2. Contributor Coordination Working Group
Chair: Jorge LondoĂąo
- Debugging persistent grade issues
- Open edX Survey Report
- Project scope
- Problem: Very few are going to generate and send the Survey Report
- Action Items: Edunext is working on the implementation (option #1 in the django admin) and hopes to share the final results soon.
- 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 itâs a library. Thereâs 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:
- No Transifex resource!!! ¡ Issue #146 ¡ openedx/frontend-app-communications
- Slack thread on frontend-app-communications: https://openedx.slack.com/archives/C037XDB9KN1/p1691157409234449
- Slack thread on problem editors: https://openedx.slack.com/archives/C049JQZFR5E/p1692114945050299
- MFEs for Quince
- Learner dashboard MFE future is uncertain. Theyâre still figuring out what to do about it. The idea is to get it ready for Quince
- Outdated MFEs
- From the last frontend meeting: âMany MFEs are stuck an old FE platform version because of breaking changes.â
- 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:
- âIdentify MFEs and new repos earlier and review the processes for enabling them. Advocate for better documentation and easier configuration while thereâs still time to make changes.â
- 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.
- Frontend summit
- Given the summitâs outcome, Xavier asked how we would prevent multiple implementations from persisting. Adolfo clarified that no decisions were made at the summit and that attendees were assigned tasks to propose unified solutions for all discussed use cases.
- Braden and Kellyâs teams have proposed course authoring and learner dashboard solutions respectively. Adolfo stressed the need for further exploration and development of these proposals, aiming to unify the Learner dashboard to address most of the discussed use cases.
- There will be an iterative approach developing the general direction of the learner dashboard. Ed emphasized the significance of having operational code and testing it in production, which everyone agreed upon regarding requirements.
- Adolfo made it clear that they were not working towards Quince but for the following release, Redwood, intending to achieve version 1.0 of the architecture or Plugin API within six months.
1.3. Data Working Group
Chair: @e0d & @blarghmatey
- Funded Contribution Updates:
- Aspects data pipelines & reports wrapping up 11/17
- New proposals are being iterated on
- Aspects updates:
- Beta server is updated with changes based on feedback
- Cristhian Garcia is working on tracking log message delivery over the event bus
- Translation pipeline is up and mostly working
- Backend work continues while Chelsea gathers feedback on charts and dashboards
- Event bus discussion:
- The event bus use cases are growing quickly, Iâd like to take a temperature check of the group and start putting out feelers around how comfortable people are with it and whether anyone would want to use it for Aspects event delivery. This may be an ongoing discussion point through several future meetings.
- Why Aspects needs the event bus for performance & scaling:
- Current approach (event-routing-backends + Ralph) creates many celery tasks per tracking log event.
- Clickhouse prefers getting data in chunks rather than row-by-row.
1.4. DEPR Working Group
Chair: @feanil
- Progress being made on [DEPR]: USE-JWT-COOKIE header ¡ Issue #371 ¡ openedx/edx-drf-extensions.
- FED-BOM making another attempt to remove legacy account, profile, and ecommerce UI pages
- Splitting them up into 3 separate PRs this time to increase odds of each one getting through
- FED-BOM is looking to use Webpack build output to identify unused direct dependencies. Should we try something similar with Python test suite coverage data?
- Unsure how much this lines up with depsplorer exploration that we already looked at: Run depsplorer on edx-platform ¡ Issue #32604 ¡ openedx/edx-platform
- We donât know if thereâs an existing coverage plugin that would already give us this information.
- Could write up some tickets for running some of these existing tools on some of our python repos.
- go to repo-health-dashboard and sort by the repositories with the most dependencies, start with the one that has the most.
- Private 2U link to Health Dashboard
- Alternatives to GitHub - Nathan-Furnal/depslorer: A tool to check if installed dependencies are used in the code ?
1.5. DevEx Working Group
Chair: @Rebecca_S_Graber & @kmccormick
- One tool we are demo-ing is DevSpace
- community helm charts:GitHub - openedx/openedx-k8s-harmony: A Prototype Helm Chart for deploying multiple Open edX instances (via Tutor) onto a cluster.
Blockers or Calls/offers for help
- Looking for a new cookiecutter-tutor-plugin maintainer
- Issues ¡ openedx/wg-developer-experience ¡ GitHub
1.6. DevOps Working Group
Chair: RĂŠgis Behmo
- 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 doesnât offer this feature, i can block the ips throught ACL but not the path is there any work arround.
1.7. Educators Working Group
Chair: @john_curricume
- Lessons from Language MOOCs, Dr. Haohsiang Lao, Director of the Chinese Language Program at MIT
Blockers or Calls/offers for help
- Looking for any and all documentors!
1.8. Frontend Working Group
Chair: @arbrandes
- 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 itâs taken so long for this particular DEPR ticket, an announcement in the forum would be corteous
- Also, since edx-platform doesnât have a proper CHANGELOG, make sure to flag commits with
BREAKING CHANGEor!, 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.) Itâs generating a lot of noise (because maintainers arenât 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.
1.9. Large Instances Working Group
- Updates from each org on the call - 2U, eduNEXT, OpenCraft, Raccoon Gang
- 2U:
- Testing devspace as a development environment for Kubernetes.
- Making progress on containerizing all of our apps
- Working on extracting Codejail to an external service.
- Raccoon Gang:
- Migration of all operations to K8S Tutor-based installations
- Getting more involved in the Tutor project to contribute to its Core/plugins.
- edSPIRIT:
- Focus on improving operations on EKS OpenedX installations
- Migrating the platform from Olive to Palm.
- OpenCraft:
- The creation of Sandbox installations when creating PRs in edx-platform and MFEâs repos is available (for specific users).
- Thereâs an open issue related to a rate-limit problem when building MFE images with unauthenticated users.
- Edunext:
- Experiencing some leak memory/CPU issues when running the codejail service at a large scale. Trying to figure out the root cause of such behavior.
- Will open a discussion in relation to the right way to add HPA to services in OpenedX.
- Full Recap
- Kubernetes Experimentation and Deployment Plans:
- Jeremy mentioned that their farm is starting to experiment with Kubernetes-based development environments and is also working on improving container raising for their production uses. Max shared that they are planning to transfer all their deployments to a new installation and may contribute to tutor enhancement. They are also preparing for the upcoming release of Kubernetes 1.4.
- Edx Plot Progress and Authentication Issues:
- GĂĄbor discussed the progress and challenges encountered in the completion of the Edx Plot and sandboxes for the platform. He highlighted the complexity of the process and mentioned that the past two weeks were largely spent on this task. GĂĄbor also mentioned an issue with the authentication of the Doctor Biad, which was running into rate limits due to the lack of proper authentication for API calls. He stated that there was a plan to address this issue and it would require further discussion with Regis and Bit adorable.
- Sandbox Feature Implementation for GitHub Request:
- GĂĄbor, Braden, Max, and jhony discussed the implementation of a sandbox feature for a GitHub request. They discussed the potential issues of hitting rate limits and the solution to use open-source resources. GĂĄbor explained that each instance has its own Lms, Cms, and workers, and Max asked about the possibility of resource duplication. They discussed the shared resources and database servers, and Braden suggested the use of an empty database to speed up the first deployment. The team also addressed the problem of long provisioning times and plans to resolve it. Emad briefly participated in the discussion, but itâs unclear what his specific input was.
- Project Status and Issues Evaluation:
- GĂĄbor, Braden, Emad, Max, and Johnny evaluated the status and issues of their shared projects. They discussed the use of helm charts for the Harmony Project and a lack of configuration in the Twitter Project.
1.10. Marketing Working Group
Chair: Eden Huthmacher
Past meeting notes 2023-10-18 MWG Meeting Notes:
- 2024 Community TOC Election
- Spread the word: 2024 Community TOC Election - Voting Starts Today! - Open edX
- Feel free to vote: 2024 Community TOC Election - Candidate Nominations
- Voting deadline is the 31st of October 2023!
- Next Open edX meetup on the 19th of October 2023 featuring RaccoonGang, DataArt and Edly by Arbisoft. All presentations are about leveraging Generative AI in Open edX in order to Enhance Learner Outcomes- register here: Leveraging Generative AI to Enhance Learner Outcomes
- Organizational Discussion MWG Meetings
- Proposal is to reduce the MWG Meetings to once a month, so that working group members can invest more time into productively working on the OKR Tasks in the respective mini-teams. The teams can connect asynchronously and synchronously as they need and only report briefly the status updates in the big MWG meetings.
- We will do a Live vote in Google Meet.
- OKR Review (starting at item OKR tasks 18-21 & 1+2): OKR´S MWG
1.11. Maintainers
Chair: Edward Zarecor
- Feanil:
- Aximimprovements is ramping up an thatâs going well.
- Could probably take on a few more repos for maintainance. Candidates
- edx-notes-api
- repo-tools
- Feanil Patel to reach out to owning team.
- Adolfo
- Many MFEs are stuck an old FE platform version because of breaking changes.
- Translation bug fixes for Comms and Course Authoring MFEs in progress:
- Ed
- Will close out phase 2
- Will move phase 3 into in progress
- Reached out to Aribisoft about maintaining event-routing-backends, will pull into phase 3 if possible.
1.12. Product Working Group
Chair: Jenna Makowski
- 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
- New Repositories: New iOS and Android repositories moved to Open edX github, with DEPR tickets queued up for documentation updates and shift to openedx-unsupported for previous app repos (iOS + Android).
- New Roadmap: New Github project roadmap for Mobile, with eventual Community Kanban boards specific to iOS / Android tasks + issues to be created next.
- Development Updates: Mobile API Updates effort in code review to support streamlined use of the new mobile apps. Quick Wins Feature gaps effort underway, should close ~30% of the gaps between previous edx apps and new openedx apps.
- Design Discovery Updates: Design progress on Offline Mode (Text + Problems), Learning site selection ready for scoping / next steps.
- Product Definition Updates: Draft requirements in progress for Streamlined Course Navigation & Sequences and Dates & Calendar Personalization .
- 2U / edX Mobile collaboration - Moving toward weekly coordination and sync meeting regarding mobile efforts to include edx mobile team efforts, including exploration of a shift to using new application code base. edX to Open edX App Data Migration Path
1.13. Security Working Group
Chair: Feanil Patel
- Vision-casting: Where do we want to go in the future for proactive security work?
- Areas
- 1st-party dependency security upgrades
- Maintenance Board
- 3rd-party security upgrades
- Maga is working on creating process in BTR for Django
- Code
- XSS linting on edx-platform
- What are the top possible improvements?
- 3rd-party security upgrades
- Django security linters
1.14. TOC
Chair: Ed Zarecor
- 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 Representativesâ 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 contributorsâ 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 communityâs 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 platformâs plugability, identifying core repositories, encouraging community involvement and contribution, and exploring ways to clarify the open-source projectâs social contract. The feasibility of delegated reviews and automatic deployment by 2U was to be discussed internally.
1.15. Translation Working Group
Chair: Eden Huthmacher
- Next meeting: November 15th
- Translation Performance Overview: May need to mark Danish for removal due to low translation + review rates
- Quince Master branch cut date - October 9th: Next Release: Quince
- Review Work board in GH: Translations Working Group ¡ GitHub
2. Events
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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!
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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 youâd like to discuss? Get the conversation started in the comments below.
4. Next async update and meetup
- Friday Nov 10th - Async update
- Friday Nov 24th - Async update
- Tuesday Nov 28th - Join the meetup here!
- Details and draft agenda on Confluence
Anything to add?
If thereâs anything else youâd like to mention, please let us know in the comments below.
Letâs find cool stuff to collaborate on!
This is cool 
Core Contributor Hours
Summary of Responses
Kudos ;p