Core Contributor News for Sprint: Aug 2nd - Aug 15th, 2025

Working Groups Core Contributors
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Core Contributor News for Sprint: Aug 2nd - Aug 15th, 2025

This sprint brought mostly positive experiences. 71% of participants rated their experience as good or great, while 29% reported a neutral experience or faced some challenges.

:tada: What are we celebrating?

@omar

  • Translations scripts and translations are going okay despite many issues

:sos_button: Who needs help?

If there’s anything you’re stuck on, need help with, or would like input on, please feel free to leave a comment in this topic. We’re here to support you!

:construction: What Pull Requests (PRs) need review?

As a CC, check for PRs that are stuck and need attention. Don’t have write access? No problem! You can still help by reviewing to move things forward. Ping Axim if there are issues merging after you review.

Below is a list of stalled PRs that need urgent attention.

Find a full list of PRs ready for review here, or focus on edx-platform PRs that need attention.

:memo: What are the Working Groups up to?

Working Group Latest Updates
BizDev The Open edX BizDev WG meeting focused on competitiveness against Moodle, Blackboard, and Canvas, highlighting key feature gaps in the higher-ed market. Discussions emphasized strengthening the platform’s extensibility and building a more accessible, categorized extensions marketplace. Updates from AI, RFPs, partnerships, revenue, and market penetration groups reinforced the importance of turning community feedback into actionable proposals. Latest meeting notes → 2025-08-20 Partnership development Meeting
Build-Test-Release (BTR) The Teak.2 Release Ceremony was successfully completed, and the team will review whether the release schedule needs updates. Looking ahead, it is essential to define roles for the upcoming Ulmo Release to ensure a smooth process. The BTR Working Group is also calling for support—inviting contributors to join and help drive the Ulmo Release and future cycles forward. Latest meeting notes → 2025-08-18 BTR Meeting Minutes
Contributor Coordination The working group decided to adopt an asynchronous-first model, retiring monthly meetings in favor of ad-hoc calls when necessary. Last meeting notes → 2025-05-13 CC Working Group Meeting Notes
Core Product The meeting centered on evaluating an MVP for Open edX Notifications, with Ali Hugo and Aamir Ayub walking through the edX implementation and exploring whether adopting it “as is” would meet community needs. Key points included scope (global vs. course-specific), learner vs. staff value, extensibility, mobile integration, and gaps such as forum notifications for staff and broader email options. The group also discussed the importance of communicating upcoming features to non-technical stakeholders, with proposals for concise, user-focused updates like a “Now, Next, Beyond” snapshot. Latest meeting notes → 2025-07-29 Core Product Meeting Notes
Data The session will include a User Groups walkthrough by Maria Grimaldi, covering the Confluence page and open pull requests for openedx-user-groups. It will also feature an update from Ty Hob on Aspects upcoming releases, including the next bug fix release, future work toward a 3.0 release, simplification of the default architecture, replacing event sinks where possible, performance improvements for Ralph, and version bumps for ClickHouse, Superset, Ralph, and Vector. Latest meeting notes → 2025-08-20 Meeting notes
Deprecation On August 7, 2025, the Open edX team reviewed frontend and MFE DEPRs. Key updates include the migration from Frontend Plugin Slots v1 to v2, raising concerns about forward compatibility and a possible shim for slot names. Deprecations cover built-in integrations (e.g., Segment), react-helmet, experiments, and direct <head> methods. In MFEs, old pages and variables are being removed in Authn and the Learner Dashboard, along with the migration of legacy platform pages into MFEs. To manage these changes, a “next” branch strategy is being proposed for frontend repos, ensuring Ulmo progress without disrupting master. These efforts align with the frontend-base refactor and aim to anticipate deprecations ahead of Ulmo. Latest meeting notes → DEPR Meetings Notes (2025)
Documentation No current updates available. Last meeting notes → 2025-04-17 Docs WG
Educators No current updates available.
Frontend The frontend-base project is progressing as an alpha NPM package, alongside converted MFEs (authn and learner-dashboard), deployable via Tutor. The goal is to complete remaining conversions by the Ulmo release, with four developers working nearly full-time. This work introduces several breaking changes, including deprecations in plugin slots, runtime config API, and specific Learner Dashboard/Authn features. Two release strategies are under discussion: 1. New client approach – maintain conversions separately from legacy MFEs, enabling greenfield development but requiring dual maintenance. 2. Merge to master ASAP – integrate once feasible, minimizing porting overhead but needing strong documentation, Tutor support, and careful handling of breaking changes. Last meeting notes → 2025-08-27 Frontend Working Group Meeting Notes
Large Instances The group discussed evaluating Typesense as a search backend and agreed on standardizing the catalog API with a unified data format. MoisĂ©s raised MySQL collation issues during forum migrations, with consensus on adopting UTF8MB4 as the modern default. Felipe shared updates on hosting models moving toward Harmony namespaces, while OpenCraft is exploring the PHD stack for sandbox and Kubernetes needs. They also addressed frontend challenges with MFEs and Webpack, noting optimism around Rust-based tools and emphasizing the need for more contributors to core infrastructure. Last meeting notes → Large Instances Meeting Notes 2025-08-19
Learning Tools (LTI) In the August 5th meeting, the group discussed the upcoming LTI Teak certification, assigned to Maria Fernanda Magallanes Z, and explored improvements to the LTI platform/consumer to make configuration easier and less dependent on xblock. Since ltistore is already in use by Pearson and OpenCraft, the plan is to document its current implementation in Ulmo while working toward future enhancements. Potential improvements identified include stronger security around shared credentials, the ability to manage them via the Authoring Environment, and a better user experience for creating LTI blocks. Last meeting notes → 2025-08-19 Meeting notes
Maintenance The group discussed several cross-repo technical issues and upgrades. Missing __init__.py files were flagged as a linting issue with Pylint, with potential fixes via new workflows, ruff rules, or alternative linting tools. Node 22/24 upgrades are in progress with multiple PRs, targeting Ulmo before October, while a React 19 upgrade is considered lower priority since React 18 remains supported. Conversations also covered repo ownership and permissions, particularly around orbi-bom and 2U-related teams, with some repos needing new maintainers. Finally, the FEATURES flattening change is blocking related work, so the team agreed on merging a quick version to avoid conflicts and handle clean-up later. Last meeting notes → 2025-08-21 Meeting notes
Marketing Upcoming events include the next Open edX Meetup on September 11th, HRTech in September, Educause in October, and LearnTec in May, where a booth is secured and two presentations have been submitted. A proposal for regional meetups will be discussed internally. Community updates highlight the nomination of Nadheem Abdulla for the Marketing Core Contributor role, recognizing his key work on the new website, blog, and meetups, and of Adel KT for his contributions to campaign optimization and community content. The Marketing Sub-Group also reviewed updates to its OKRs. Last meeting notes →Agenda, Aug 20th, 2025
Mobile Edward Byun will refine the Mobile Roadmap Reorg proposal next week, focusing on creating a generic openedx-apps-mobile repo as the central source for ongoing work, with platform-specific PRs linked to issues. Additional elements such as bug tracking and community visibility will follow after further discussion. There’s an open call for more PR reviewers, as current support from Zeitlabs and Raccoon Gang can create bottlenecks. On development progress, the iOS version of the Progress Page has been merged, while the Android version is under review. Last meeting notes →Agenda, August 15th, 2025
Technical Oversight Committee No current updates available. Last meeting notes → TOC Meeting Notes - 2025-05-14
Translation Eden Huthmacher reported a decline in language performance following the transition from edx-platform to the openedx-translations project. Machine translations have now been activated for all languages except Portuguese (Portugal). A GitHub board review of the Translations Working Group was also shared for tracking and visibility. Last meeting notes → 2025-08-20 Translation WG Meeting
UX/UI The session included quick updates on current UX/UI efforts, including a centralized database of design projects (Sam Daitzman) and a proposal to reintroduce the search bar in the Learner Dashboard (Chelsea Rathbun). Edward Byun shared progress on a Platform UX issue tracker, while Santiago Suarez proposed a multi-question problem editor to enhance authoring flexibility. Last meeting notes →2025-06-12 - UX/UI Working Group Meeting

:date: What events are coming up?

:rocket: What are we working on?

:handshake: Want to participate in Core Contributor Governance?

  • Participate to the work of the Contributor Coordination Working Group. The group works asynchronously using the working group tasks board, and we’d love your input there. You can review and comment on existing threads there, or post your own topic to discuss with the group by creating your own ticket on the board (“+ Add item” in “New topics and issues to discuss”).

:speech_balloon: Anything to add?

Share your thoughts in Slack (openedx.slack.com) or the comments below!