Core Contributor Update: Sep 16 - Sep 29, 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
- What they’re going to do with e-commerce bug reports? (specifically: this one):
- They’re still supporting Open edX E-Commerce until E-Commerce Coordinator is released.
- Jorge will list the team members that have access to an e-commerce instance to reach out to them everytime they have.
- Maksim Sokolskiy will review the issue internally with his team.
- Palm: Tests for analytic event changes in new MFEs #259
- Creating an issue to include MFEs test cases for Quince
- Quince release work plan: Next Release: Quince
Blockers or Calls/offers for help
They got the following message from Kyle:
”Hi folks. Emad has a slew of PRs here that add Persian language support to various MFEs. He has been waiting for a long time on review from various different teams that own the MFEs. This is especially tough because he has been having to resolve merge conflicts over and over again in, as translations files are regularly changed. I am wondering, since each change is very similar, could one or two engineers with translations experience just review all of them and/or give general feedback on the approach? You don’t need merge access–I am happy to merge them if someone approves them; I just don’t have the knowledge to review them myself."
- chore: translations updated by CodeWithEmad · Pull Request #1151 · openedx/frontend-app-learning · GitHub
- feat: Persian language support added by CodeWithEmad · Pull Request #553 · openedx/frontend-app-course-authoring · GitHub
- fix: Persian language by CodeWithEmad · Pull Request #555 · openedx/frontend-app-discussions · GitHub
- Persian language by CodeWithEmad · Pull Request #246 · openedx/frontend-app-ora-grading · GitHub
Additionally, frontend-app-communications doesn’t exist in Transifex. Is that something this group could help with, or do the owners of the MFE need to fix that?
People that have time for this will take a look at the PRs
Meeting notes
1.2. Contributor Coordination Working Group
Chair: Jorge Londoño
- Next meeting: October 3rd
Past meeting notes 2023-09-05 CC Working Group Meeting Notes:
- 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:
- Slack thread on frontend-app-communications:
- Slack thread on problem editors:
- Review needed on opaque keys PR:
- fix: type hints weren’t installed properly, add type hints for Django Fields by bradenmacdonald · Pull Request #259 · openedx/opaque-keys
- Maria will review, Stefania will ask Ghassan and Alexz will try to get someone from Raccoon Gang.
- List of repositories that are included in named releases, but don’t have a maintainer, Release repos
- The goal is still to include all dependencies from the Open edX stable releases, including edx-platform
- Start date? Pilot Phase 3 indicates Aug 1st 2023
- New data September 7th
- TOC Decision Requests : Looking for suggestions, comments and questions about OEP-63
- Contributors Meetup - Call for participation & meeting time poll
1.3. Data Working Group
Chair: @e0d & @blarghmatey
- Funded Contribution Updates:
- Redis Bus - completed
- Aspects data pipelines & reports on break through next month
- New proposal(s) kicking off this week
- New events:
- The Aspects team has added or is in the process of adding some new events to enable v1 reporting:
- Tracking: Login / logout (merged 9/19)
- Tracking: Completions (in progress)
- xAPI: Forum events
- xAPI: Grading events
- xAPI: Exam events
- ClickHouse Sink: User profiles (optional)
Blockers or Calls/offers for help
- Beta is open: Aspects Beta
- Feel free to join up, we’ll set up access for you! Communications are in Slack: #aspects
- Quick demo / walkthrough of where we’re at, and discussions of next steps.
1.4. DEPR Working Group
Chair: @feanil
- Depsplorer results
- Run depsplorer on edx-platform · Issue #32604 · openedx/edx-platform
- If diff coverage is being used?
- we are going to try to remove the paver command that calls it and see if any tests break
- New tools for managing Python dependencies in edx-platform
- Depsplorer has a bug where it doesn’t handle submodules
- seems like it’s not particularly rigorously maintained, so maybe not a good candidate for use going forward
- Small task for someone to pick up:
- xqueue/xqueue-watcher deprecation
- 2U is not quite ready for deprecation yet, because we don’t have the resources
- we need to put in a forcing function, maybe setting for the end of 2024
- update acceptance date to October 2024
1.5. DevEx Working Group
Chair: @Rebecca_S_Graber & @kmccormick
- a 2U enterprise team is trying out OEP-37 dev data
- (anyone can try that out!)
- OrbStack is in 2U vendor review
- 2U is likely to recommend OrbStack (closed-source) for Devstack, with Colima (F/OSS) as a recommended alternative
- Kyle still using improved Tutor build prototype, RĂ©gis is reviewing
1.6. DevOps Working Group
Chair: RĂ©gis Behmo
1.7. Educators Working Group
Chair: @john_curricume
- Alexandria Hsun Yen from The PostDoc Academy gave a short presentation about a “personalized emails” experiment and its effect on student engagement and completion for a course of 1,200 students.
- Blender” Dashboard demonstration from Campus.il
Blockers or Calls/offers for help
- Looking for any and all documentors!
1.8. Frontend Working Group
Chair: @arbrandes
- Status of the paragon.alpha migration:
- It’s moving along, but unlikely to make it into the Quince release: even if it makes it into paragon@master, in addition to a new Paragon release, it will require all MFEs to actually start using it. If we want it in the R release, we need an epic owner for it, and contributors.
- Brian Smith has tentatively offered to lead the epic once OEP-58 completes
- Felipe Montoya graciously offered resources for the MFE upgrade effort
- Links
- MFE upgrades
- The formatjs PR to frontend-build just merged!
- React 17 and react-router-v6 are moving along
- frontend-app-learning still pending
- react-router-v6 issues with some MFES and Tutor; Brian Smith notes that such PRs should be tested against Tutor before merging.
- Frontend Pluggability Summit
- See forum thread. The date is set for Wed, Oct 25, 14:00 UTC. It’s a 3-hour meeting. If you have ideas or proposals, make sure to prepare them beforehand.
- MFEs and Quince
- Learner Dashboard: needs a maintainer first; likely Axim
- Will try to get it cleaned up for official Quince release
- Communications: needs i18n fixes, work in progress (also, see Slack thread.)
1.9. Large Instances Working Group
- eduNEXT
- we introduced Harmony in one of our production installations. (nginx + cert-manager). Moisés González : we chose one of our smaller installations. We deployed the Helm charts using ArgoCD. We used kustomize to deploy the CRDs since they’re managed outside of the Harmony helm charts. So far it seems to be working well but it’s new so we’ll see.
- we are exploring different options for running Open edX in lighter distributions of Kubernetes, such as k3s. We hope to have findings to share in two weeks.
- 2U
- Working on MySQL 8 upgrade at 2U.
- Harmony project updates: Review list of PRs and issues, and assign anything un-assigned.
- Hosting MySQL and Mongo in Kubernetes globally · Issue #46 · openedx/openedx-k8s-harmony - eduNEXT is experimenting with hosting the database within the cluster.
- Hosting of Clickhouse for Aspects · Issue #45 · openedx/openedx-k8s-harmony · GitHub - want to know if we can share components like Clickhouse among multiple Open edX instances in a cluster to reduce resource costs.
- Maksim Sokolskiy says Racoon Gang may be investigating Helm deployment of Clickhouse etc in the near future.
- Jhony/mcdaniel monitoring services by jfavellar90 · Pull Request #41 · openedx/openedx-k8s-harmony - still in progress. Testing is hitting some issues with Karpenter scaling. Jhony Avella is hoping to work on this in the coming week.
1.10. Marketing Working Group
Chair: Eden Huthmacher
- 2024 Community TOC Election
- Deadline for nominations + registered voters: September 29th, 2023
- Candidate nominations must be posted here: 2024 Community TOC Election - Candidate Nominations
- Spread the word among your clients and have them register to vote here: 2024 TOC Election - Register to Vote! - Open edX
- Next Open edX meetup featuring DataArt and Edly by Arbisoft. Both presentations are about leveraging Generative AI in Open edX in order to Enhance Learner Outcomes- register here: Leveraging Generative AI to Enhance Learner Outcomes
- Next quarterly conference proposal: Please research for alternatives for the first quarter of 2024
- OKR Review (starting at item 7): OKR´S MWG
1.11. Maintainers
Chair: Edward Zarecor
- Next meeting: October 5th
- Feanil:
- Aximimprovements is ramping up an that’s 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.
Blockers or Calls/offers for help
- Urgent need for FE plugability
- Examples of business specific code that was committed. This can’t be our normal course of dealings.
- Related problem, different spin
- Problem to solve: How to extend MFEs in business specific ways
- Ed is going to schedule a summit to propose a specific recommendation for solving this problem.
1.12. Product Working Group
Chair: Jenna Makowski
- UX/UI Working Group
- Jon Fay from 2U took us through the latest version of the designs for the new Studio Home page (feel free to leave comments and questions on the file). A few things we discussed:
- the UX for filtering and sorting courses,
- when course end dates should be displayed and when they might not be necessary,
- what type of content is searched when the user enters text into the search bar.
- Santiago from EduNext ran a mini usability test with Cassie from OpenCraft. The test focused on 2 of the main user flows within the Content Tagging MVP:
- One: the flow in which content authors add tags to units,
- Two: the flow in which users search the course outline.
The test lead to some interesting realizations! EduNext will be conducting the same usability test with a handful of superusers, and Ali Hugo will then update the wireframes for the MVP accordingly.- Mobile Working Group
- Since our last update, we have kicked off a number of projects in development and discovery. During our weekly meetings we have reviewed a number of documents as well focused on identifying the gaps between the edx mobile app and the new open edx mobile apps. Additional details below per project.
- Mobile API Updates - #fc-0031-mobile-api-migration-axim-raccoongang
- Development has started to update edx-platform and other services with the right API changes necessary to run the new open edx mobile application. (Approximate delivery date end of September.)
- Quick Win Feature Gap Project - In Consideration
- In consideration is a project that should close 13/38 of the feature gaps identified by edx mobile team relative to new open edx mobile apps. A few improvements to video experience (5/13), app upgrade messaging (3/13) and others are included here. Development sizing and product / design definition are in progress currently - Project - Quick Win Feature Gap List
- Learning Site Selection - In Consideration
- In queue for mobile development consideration, should allow for providers to build single apps for multiple open edx sites / clients to lower cost to offer a mobile experience to learners - Project - Learning Site Selection (FC-25a). Initial set of product requirements and design mockups available on project page for review.
- Other projects in consideration that are earlier in the requirement definition process listed below:
- Project - Improved Mobile Discovery (FC-28a)
- Project - Offline Mode Discovery (Text + Problems) (FC-28c)
- Project - Course Dates, Personalized Schedules, and Calendar Syncing
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
- Last reminder TOC nomination listings and voter registration closes tomorrow: 2024 TOC Election - Register to Vote! - Open edX
1.15. Translation Working Group
Chair: Eden Huthmacher
- 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
- LWMOOCs conference (October 11-13) is accepting Poster Submissions
Reach out to Mary Ellen Wiltrout on Slack or via the LwMOOCs website: IEEE LwMOOCS 2023
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 Oct 3 - Join the meetup here!
- Friday Oct 13 - Async update
- Details and draft agenda on Confluence
Anything to add?
If there’s anything else you’d like to mention, please let us know in the comments below.
I notice 
Who would be the best person to ping for this? Happy to participate to that conversation btw (or even do the ping myself if you want).