Core Contributor News for Sprint: Nov 8th - Nov 21st, 2025
This sprint brought mostly positive experiences. 71% of participants rated their experience as good or great, while 29% reported a neutral or negative experience.
What are we celebrating?
- Ulmo translation is ready
- We’ve deployed Ulmo to two of our testing environments.
Who needs help?
We continue to have performance issues with the discussion system. Perhaps this is because we are now on Discussions v2, but are still using MongoDB. After many issues with the database migration, we have been able to migrate one (large) course and performance is slightly better.
We discovered an issue with persistent grades that seems to been introduced after Ulmo. We reverted a PR intended to improve caching of course info blocks (3766), but it hasn’t resolved the issue. To be clear, this appears to be an issue in the current master branch, and not Ulmo.
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. These are just some of the many PRs that require immediate review and action. In addition, there are several Draft PRs that need attention to move forward. Please take a moment to review and update them as needed so they don’t remain blocked. Thank you!
Stuck waiting for review
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feat(i18n): add language preference management functionality
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build: update release workflow to create PR with release changes
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refactor: conditionally render
Replace videobutton & fix redirection URLs -
fix: add missing space symbol to the ‘additional.help.text’ field
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[FC-0099] docs: add ADR proposing architecture for authz framework
Draft PRs: Require review and updates to move forward:
Find a full list of PRs ready for review here, or focus on edx-platform PRs that need attention.
What are the Working Groups up to?
| Working Group | Latest Updates |
|---|---|
| BizDev | The final BizDev WG meeting of 2025 reflected on achievements, challenges, and next steps, emphasizing the need to revitalize participation and clarify responsibilities. Around 55 product proposals were reviewed during the year, with progress on the AI Extensions Framework and key partnerships like Turnitin and Credly. For 2026, the group aims to simplify structures, improve visibility across WGs, and relaunch with clearer goals in January. Last meeting notes → 2025-11-12 Partnership development Meeting |
| Build-Test-Release (BTR) | The group reviewed the status of the Ulmo.1 release (Dec 12, 2025) and confirmed there are no major release blockers, with 196 tests completed and 20 issues opened from 25 failures. Updates covered testing, new features (content libraries, discovery, RBAC), release management, documentation, and debugging, with clear owners and calls for help to finalize work. Decisions: keep the Dec 12 testing deadline, maintain full RBAC test coverage, pause email/notification and posts testing until fixes land, and continue async collaboration to close remaining issues. Latest meeting notes → 2025-11-25 BTR Meeting Minutes |
| Governance WG | The Governance Working Group (formerly the Contributor Coordination Working Group) exists to enable continuous improvement of Open edX community governance. It provides a recurring and open forum for discussing community-wide governance topics, supporting proposal development, unblocking issues, and ensuring follow-up on initiatives. Latest meeting notes → Governance Working Group Charter |
| Core Product | The meeting focused on clarifying how to handle feature ideas and fast-track changes, agreeing that uncertain cases should be posted on Discuss for broader input. The group also proposed creating a new Learner Motivation and Engagement Subgroup under the Product WG to explore gamification and engagement features with open participation. Santiago Suarez will create a Confluence page for the new subgroup and schedule recurring meetings to define its scope and priorities. Last meeting notes → 2025-11-04 Core Product Meeting Notes |
| Data | No current updates available. Last meeting notes → 2025-08-20 Meeting notes |
| Deprecation | The group reviewed fast-track updates to the DEPR OEP, continuing efforts to streamline the deprecation process. The session concluded with an OEP board review, focusing on items in the Draft column for next steps. Last meeting notes → DEPR Meetings Notes (2025) |
| Documentation | No current updates available. Last meeting notes → 2025-10-01 Docs WG |
| Educators | Feanil from Axim presented LTI 1.3 integration improvements, introducing the LTI Store and a new Tutor plugin to simplify setup and reuse configurations across components. He demonstrated a reusable configuration process using slugs, discussed upcoming Studio integration, and outlined plans for enhanced security and dynamic registration. The meeting closed with Ulmo LTI testing updates, inviting educators to join the testing sprint and help align documentation before the December release. Last meeting notes → 2025-11-10 Educators |
| Frontend | The group reviewed a proposed dependency freeze ADR for core frontend libraries (Node, React, Router, Query, Paragon, Frontend Base) to create predictable, aligned MFE development across releases. They discussed version targeting and feature-level requirements, library-specific upgrade considerations, and potential future migrations such as React 19 and TanStack Router. Next steps include updating the ADR, reviewing pending PRs, and planning the Paragon 23 upgrade within Frontend Base. Latest meeting notes → 2025-11-20 Frontend Working Group Meeting Notes |
| Large Instances | Kubernetes & Large/Multi Instances DevOps collaboration - 2025/11/11 11:59 EST - Transcript. Last meeting notes → Large Instances Meeting Notes 2025-10-28 |
| Learning Tools (LTI) | The group discussed ways to support the 1EdTech certification process, focusing on reviewing the Open edX LTI roadmap to identify next steps and ensure compliance. Members were encouraged to contribute by testing, documentation updates, and feedback on integration improvements. The goal is to advance LTI certification readiness and strengthen Open edX’s interoperability with external tools. Last meeting notes → 2025-11-11 Meeting notes |
| Maintenance | Django 5.2 remains in testing under the BTR team for the Ulmo release cut. 2U has decided to postpone its deployment until the Ulmo.1 release cycle. Further updates will follow once testing and stability checks are complete. Last meeting notes → 2025-11-13 Meeting notes |
| Marketing | No current updates available. Last meeting notes →Agenda, Oct 14th, 2025 |
| Mobile | The group reviewed several mobile-focused proposals, including In-App Purchases, Smart Push Automation, AI discussion seeding, and a plugin-based architecture for new block types, along with design tokens for mobile to improve theming and dark mode. Key concerns included backend complexity, performance impact of additional default blocks, DRM-safe video options, and alignment between mobile and web experiences. These discussions inform FY26 goals around mobile adoption, ecosystem expansion, and leveraging the mobile format, supported by an active idea list for future enhancements. Latest meeting notes →Agenda, Nov 21st, 2025 |
| Technical Oversight Committee | The TOC approved the final election slate, and conference planning continues with interest in adding student and instructor voices. A proposal for community-wide notifications raised concerns, leading to consensus that messages should target administrators—not learners. 2U’s shift to deploying from release branches sparked discussion on adopting smaller, more frequent releases to improve testing, upgrades, and overall reliability. Last meeting notes → TOC Meeting Notes - 2025-11-12 |
| Translation | The meeting reviewed translation performance, noting a decline after the transition to the openedx-translations project and the activation of machine translations for most languages. Omar walked through the GitHub board to assess progress and pending work. Action items and decisions were captured in the Translation Working Group repository for follow-up. Last meeting notes → 2025-11-19 Translation WG Meeting |
| Design | The meeting closed with preparations for the Ulmo Test-a-thon, led by Sam Daitzman. Participants were encouraged to support release testing, with special attention to design-related test cases. The goal is to boost coverage and ensure the Ulmo release meets visual and UX quality standards. Last meeting notes → 2025-11-19 - Design Working Group Meeting |
What events are coming up?
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We are excited to announce that Western Governors University (WGU) will be hosting the Open edX Conference 2026. May 19 – 22, 2026 • Salt Lake City, Utah
- Register now and join the Open edX community in reimagining what’s possible in learning!
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Join a working group meeting using the community calendar.
What are we working on?
- Our community is working on exciting projects! Visit our Open edX Roadmap and Release Planning Spreadsheet to find out what’s happening.
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”).
Anything to add?
Share your thoughts in Slack (openedx.slack.com) or the comments below!
