Contributors Meetup Async Update - September 30th, 2023 - October 13th, 2023

Working Groups Core Contributors
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Core Contributor Update: Sep 30 - Oct 13, 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

Blockers or Calls/offers for help

:memo: Meeting notes

1.3. Data Working Group

Chair: @e0d & @blarghmatey

:paperclip: Latest news

  • :arrow_down: Past meeting notes 2023-09-20 Meeting notes :
  • 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.

:memo: Meeting notes

1.4. DEPR Working Group

Chair: @feanil

:paperclip: Latest news

:memo: Meeting notes

1.5. DevEx Working Group

Chair: @Rebecca_S_Graber & @kmccormick

:paperclip: Latest news

:memo: Meeting notes

1.6. DevOps Working Group

Chair: RĂ©gis Behmo

:paperclip: Latest news

:memo: Meeting notes

1.7. Educators Working Group

Chair: @john_curricume

:paperclip: Latest news

  • :arrow_down: Past meeting notes 2023-09-18 Educator WG:
    • 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

: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

:memo: Meeting notes

1.9. Large Instances Working Group

Chair: @braden & @Felipe

:paperclip: Latest news

  • eduNEXT
    • we (eduNEXT) were able to set up an installation with a single-node k8s cluster using k3s, including all the databases (MySQL, Mongo, Redis). We applied a couple of load tests. We were able to support up to 60 concurrent users (w/ 4 cpus, 16 CPU); or up to 30 concurrent in the browser tests.
    • We’re experimenting with k3s because we’re looking for something to fill the gap for customers that don’t need a full k8s cluster but need something more scalable and flexible than just a single VM. So far it seems promising. What we’ve seen is that “tutor local” is tuned for very small instances and the moment you get significant traffic, it doesn’t handle it well. So this approach is more attractive for small production instances.
    • It also allows us to use the same deployment tools as before beacause it’s still kubernetes.
  • 2U
    • The Arch-BOM team at 2U is getting closer to focusing on dev environments and deployments; we’ve finished dealing with a number of issues that were taking up a lot of our time, so excited to get to those projects. Learning in depth about k8s from the book. Also looking at Orbstack, and it’s really nice, has lots of integrations to let you explore the file system easily. There’s also Colima which is open source (has no UI though). What’s better about Orbstack is that it’s 3x as fast as Colima/DockerDesktop, and has all these extra developer convenience features.
  • Harmony project updates: we’re still blocked on publishing official Helm chart until at least two orgs are using it in production. eduNEXT is testing it on two clusters, now need OpenCraft or RacoonGang to do the same.
    • Karpenter PR: Jhony Avella I added a couple of resources that are required for Karpenter to work properly as well as a newer version of the Karpenter Helm chart. Problem is that Karpenter needs a couple of additional CRDs after installing the Helm chart, and Helm doesn’t manage CRDs. Trying to install them as part of the Harmony Helm chart was causing a failure so for now you have to install them manually.
    • Felipe Montoya How important is Karpenter/AWS? Do we have a sense of which providers will be using it and to what extent? Answer: lots of interest but nobody on the call is using it yet.
    • Prometheus/Grafana ticket: we may want to revisit this in light of Aspects; maybe use Superset instead etc.
    • Support for Google Cloud: we discussed closing the issue unless/until someone is interested in using it. Current providers on the call are not using GKE.

Blockers or Calls/offers for help

  • Felipe Montoya : Last week I asked to Frontend Working Group about the switch to Paragon Alpha, which includes design tokens and CSS variables, and I previously thought it was going to be merged in October and released with Quince. But I found out that’s unlikely, and it definitely won’t be in all the MFEs by Quince. We are trying to push it forward via the Frontend WG to get it into Redwood because it will make theming many MFEs much easier.
  • Braden MacDonald Related: there is a frontend pluggability summit coming up on Oct. 25 Frontend Pluggability Summit

:memo: Meeting notes

1.10. Marketing Working Group

Chair: Eden Huthmacher

:paperclip: Latest news

:memo: Meeting notes

1.11. Maintainers

Chair: Edward Zarecor

:paperclip: Latest news

Blockers or Calls/offers for help

:memo: Meeting notes

1.12. Product Working Group

Chair: Jenna Makowski

:paperclip: Latest news

  • 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

:paperclip: Latest news

:memo: Meeting notes

1.14. TOC

Chair: Ed Zarecor

:paperclip: Latest news

:memo: Meeting notes

1.15. Translation Working Group

Chair: Eden Huthmacher

:paperclip: Latest news

:memo: Meeting notes

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

  • Friday Oct 27th - Async update
  • Tuesday Oct 31st - 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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Thank you @Natalia_Choconta this is great to have!

Here is the latest Core Contributors retrospective.
Cc: @antoviaque

Time contributed

In the last month (i.e. 2 sprints) a total of 372.25 hours has been reported with a median of 10 hours contributed. Only 30% of Core Contributors responded. Let’s look at our response rates since June 2022:

Screen Shot 2023-10-21 at 00.06.17
Screen Shot 2023-10-21 at 00.06.172592Ă—978 178 KB

Productivity got low scores this month so let’s aim to improve on this metric this next sprint! :slight_smile:

Screen Shot 2023-10-20 at 23.46.47
Screen Shot 2023-10-20 at 23.46.472456Ă—678 51.3 KB

Compared this to the average scores over the last year which are higher:

Screen Shot 2023-10-21 at 00.05.13
Screen Shot 2023-10-21 at 00.05.132510Ă—740 55.4 KB

Do you need any help? Or is there anything you’d like to collaborate on? User
Grading troubles: https://discuss.openedx.org/t/debugging-persistent-grade-issues/11155/5.
 Peter Pinch
— —
We still have stuck PRs - looking for core contributors who would be willing to offer to review (we will discuss with the maintainers/reviewers who can’t review, to see if that can be delegated). See Contributions · GitHub for the list of current stuck PRs. Xavier Antoviaque
What should we improve? Any blockers? User
It is still hard to get more contributors involved in the product conversations in a timely manner. Juan Montoya
What did you accomplish this month? User
Stumbled onto one cause of our persistent grading problems: Debugging persistent grade issues - #5 by pdpinch Peter Pinch
Attended the Core Product Working Group.
Gave feedback on the _Feature Enhancement Proposal: Hide Sections from course outline.
Joined in on the conversation about the organisation switcher on Studio Home.		 Ali Hugo
Participated in the Frontend WG meeting where we agreed on some action points to help get the design-tokens/css vars landing in master during the remaining Q.
Reviewed PRs: 33059, 33219.
Reviewed and presented the work of the woocommerce project.		 Felipe Montoya
Translated and reviewed strings for fr_CA in Transifex for edx-platform and openedx-translations.
Browsed Slack and DIscourse.
Attended Build-Test-Release Working Group meetup.
Attended Translations Working Group meetup.		 Pierre Mailhot
Reviewed instructor dashboard in aspects.
Reviewed a ERB PR.
Reviewed a SCORM xblock issue and tried to reproduce it.


 Zia Fazal
Reviewed the LTI MVP spec and left comments.
Started work on the Open edX 2024 branding concepts.TOC - Bi-monthly meeting.
TOC - Write draft report for publication.
PR Delays - Review & respond ticket Issues · openedx/wg-coordination · GitHub
Onboarding courses - Upstreaming - Meeting & plan (sprint next week, publication of course on FUN).		 Xavier Antoviaque
— —
Attended the large instances meeting.
Reviewed the Woocommerce Plugin for open edX and published it to the wordpress directory.
Wrote the proposal for handling flexible groups using the teams feature: https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/COMM/pages/3885334531/Enhancements+to+Teams+to+make+learner+grouping+more+flexible.
Reviewed the status of the RBAC project in the context of the flexible groups initiative.
Reported issue in aspects about the retirement process.		 Felipe Montoya
On vacation from October 7 to October 16.
Translated and reviewed some strings for fr_CA in edx-platform and openedx-translations.
Attended Build-Test-Release WG meeting.
Attended Open edX Contrubutors Discussion.		 Pierre Mailhot
Reviewed 3 PRs and published new release of H5P Xblock.
Created a file upload optimization PR in SCORM xblock.
 Zia Fazal
I’ve been doing product owning work for a number of ORA improvement proposals as part of the campus wg agenda. Juan Montoya
Reviewed the LTI MVP spec and left comments.
Started work on the Open edX 2024 branding concepts.		 Cassie
What do you plan to work on in the upcoming sprint? User
Attend Build-Test-Release Working Group meetup (Oct 2).
Attend Open edX Contributors Discussion (Oct 3).
Translate and review strings for fr_CA in Transifex for edx-platform and openedx-translations.
Testing Tutor v16.1.2 on our fork of Palm.2.
Away on vacation from Oct 7 to Oct 15. Most probably testing quince.master (when the test server is made available) and palm.3 on our fork (when available).
Translate and review some strings for fr_CA in edx-platform and openedx-translations.
Attend Build-Test-Release WG meeting.
Attend Translations WG meeting.
Probably attend DevX WG meeting.		 Pierre Mailhot
Training my replacement for BTR release notes expert.
Testing Quince release candidate.
Testing LTI PR: Sign in to GitHub · GitHub
Improve documentation of rate limiting on bulk mail.		 Peter Pinch
Presenting the progress for copy/pasting a unit during the UX/UI meeting.
Working towards a decision about the org switcher on the Studio Home.		 Ali Hugo
Core sprints - Help answers questions / unblock.
Onboarding Course (Upstreaming) - Test video editing, participate in upcoming remote sprint day.
Core sprint report - Review redesign.
OEP for escalation process to TOC.Reply.
 Xavier Antoviaque
Keep working on ORA improvement proposals. Juan Montoya
Feat: Superset introspection · Issue #427 · openedx/tutor-contrib-aspects · GitHub Jill
What went well this sprint? User
Great feedback on Side effects of Old Mongo Removal Peter Pinch
There was a lot of good communication about elements of UX that apply to various projects being worked on in the community. Ali Hugo
I feel the process for proosing new product features is progressively taking shape Juan Montoya
The pile of stuck PR has diminished quite a bit! Kudos to Michelle and Tim for the work, and to the reviewers who pushed them through.
Almost fully caught up from vacations - if you are waiting for something from me, let me know!		 Xavier Antoviaque
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@Natalia_Choconta @Dean Thank you for the reports! :+1: And great to see some graphs in the core sprint report, it looks nice! :slight_smile:

Yey, kudos for getting to the beta! :partying_face: @e0d @blarghmatey @jill To attract more testers, it could maybe be worth posting a dedicated forum thread, with some screenshots? I would definitely be curious to see it :slight_smile:

@dave is the expert on grading :slight_smile: Any idea about the issue described by Peter?

@arbrandes FYI ^

@Felipe Apologies for the delay on our side - I have been discussing with @gabor @mtyaka @braden @itsjeyd to prioritize it better on our end. It looks like we are going to be able to schedule it right after the current work we are doing on PR sandboxes.

@jmakowski @ali_hugo @Cassie Were you able to find testers another way?

It’s not the first time we have trouble getting user feedback, correct? I wonder if we could maybe do something globally about this - maybe it would be worth setting up a betatesting program - where individuals and organizations could register to get informed of new upcoming features to test, and be provided privileged channels for giving their feedback in exchange? This could be as simple to setup as a mailing list, tied to a registration form with some info for you? It could then be advertised on the blog – and maybe in the Open edX interface itself (a banner in Studio for instructors? in the LMS for students?)

@juancamilom What were the product discussions you tried to get people involved? We are currently looking at improving upstream reviews speed, that might be something to also consider in that context. FYI @jmakowski

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We haven’t found other testers yet, but in the latest UX/UI Working Group Meeting, we briefly discussed the need for a database of test users. We didn’t go into detail about how to recruit these users, so I’m very interested in your idea of a mailing list / banner notification / blog post + registration form. I think that could work nicely!

Did you have something in mind for the “privileged channel” for giving feedback?

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@ali_hugo That could probably simply be the mailing list itself, where participants could reply and discuss directly with you and the other product managers involved in the program? Plus also participation to interviews from time to time?

Let me know if you need any help with the setup.

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Thank you for your interest! @Chelsea_Rathbun has recently joined Axim as the Product Owner for Aspects, and so we’d like to give her a chance to settle in before making a larger announcement.

But you’re more than welcome to Join the Beta testing effort!

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Will do. Thanks @antoviaque :slightly_smiling_face:

I’ll run your idea for recruiting test users by the rest of the UX/UI Working Group in our next call and see what they think. I’ll keep you posted.

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@antoviaque An update on the above ^^

We discussed the option of a beta testing program in the UX/UI Working Group meeting last week. The idea was well-received, but it was decided that we will tackle it incrementally instead of diving straight in. We will start small by using Slack Channels and a Google Form (see the meeting notes for more detail).

You are sure to notice some activity related to this over the coming weeks. We will revisit ideas of a blog post, landing page, and Studio/LMS notifications at a later stage once we have had more time to develop our recruitment approach.

1 Like