Core Contributor News for Sprint: Oct 11th - Oct 24th, 2025
This sprint brought mostly positive experiences. 78% of participants rated their experience as good or great, while 22% reported a neutral or negative experience.
Performance issues and mysql migration issues in the discussion forums continue to plague us. We’ll know better today if we’re out of the woods since there are so many assignments due.
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!
Stalled PRs: Some of the many PRs that need urgent attention:
The BizDev WG meeting focused on updates to the Product Feedback Loop, Workforce Development & AI Training insights, and ongoing alignment across subgroups.
Additional discussions covered market alignment, revenue growth, and expansion initiatives to strengthen collaboration across working groups. Latest meeting notes → 2025-10-22 Partnership development Meeting
The final Go/No-Go check focused on confirming RBAC PR merges, sandbox readiness (Indigo theme, Aspects 2.6.0), and QA coverage before the Oct 28 cutoff (moved to Oct 30). Teams reviewed testing assignments, documentation progress, and security patch status, ensuring all key items are tracked for release. Next steps include finalizing release notes, validating sandbox stability, and preparing early tasks for the upcoming Willow cycle.Latest meeting notes → 2025-10-27 BTR Meeting Minutes
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
The meeting announced the launch of the new Product Contribution Process, now live and open for more product reviewers. The Schema team presented specs for the new Course Outline page in Studio and introduced a proposal for an Enrollment Page Editor to improve course discoverability. ASU proposed a new PDF XBlock for mobile viewing and offline access, marking future collaboration opportunities. Latest meeting notes → 2025-10-21 Core Product Meeting Notes
The meeting discussed MIT’s transition off the old progress page, with plans to locate or create a dedicated DEPR ticket. Updates covered forum migration issues (MySQL bugs, retired users, performance) and ongoing ProctorTrack deprecation cleanup. Additional notes included a pending Program Dashboard deprecation ticket and a proposal to improve the board review scheduling process. Latest meeting notes → DEPR Meetings Notes (2025)
The Documentors WG focused on aligning testing documentation with Ulmo test cases, addressing mismatches and missing coverage for features like login and password reset. The group agreed that documentation should be the primary reference, with John and Peter mapping test cases to docs and prioritizing newer features (libraries, taxonomies, metrics).
Ana Garcia will create an AI-narrated demo video for the libraries feature, while @Sarina Canelake supports release notes and documentation gap tracking. Latest meeting notes → 2025-10-01 Docs WG
The meeting covered Ulmo launch updates on Notifications and RBAC, both entering testing with sandbox validation and a new admin console for role configuration. Sam Daitzman showcased major improvements to Content Libraries, including multi-level content reuse, syncing, and publishing tools, inviting community feedback. Santiago Suarez proposed reorganizing the Advanced Settings page to improve usability and feature placement across the platform. Latest meeting notes→2025-10-21 Educators
The Frontend WG (Oct 23, 2025) discussed catalog MFE integration, agreeing to move forward with a plugin-based approach for flexibility and easier management. They reviewed the new Admin Console MFE with RBAC, enabling role assignment and permissions for libraries ahead of the upcoming release cut. Adolfo demoed MIT’s new “Never Show Correct Answers” feature, improving academic integrity for re-used courses by hiding correct responses while still grading them. Latest meeting notes → 2025-10-23 Frontend Working Group Meeting Notes
The group reviewed progress on the LTI platform (consumer), with new documentation added and discussions on whether to create a new LTI consumer component. Key gaps and improvement areas were identified based on recent interviews and roadmap updates. On the LTI tool (provider) side, the team began reviewing next steps related to licensing and implementation scope. Latest meeting notes → 2025-10-14 Meeting notes
The team is waiting for Tutor-MFE compatibility with Node 24, with merges proceeding as needed before the release cut; 2U will validate afterward.
Windows support looks stable except for Elasticsearch, which will be addressed by the Willow release next year. The Codejail DEPR is unblocked, with a new Django-based service ready—next step: confirm with Moises on moving forward with the Tutor plugin implementation. Last meeting notes → 2025-10-30 Meeting notes
The upcoming Open edX Meetup (Oct 30) will feature the next conference location announcement, a Distinguished Contributor Celebration, and a TOC Nominee Roundtable. Upcoming events include Educause in two weeks and Bett London (Jan 2026), with regional meetups approved for funding up to $5K per quarter. The Marketing Sub-Group also reviewed and updated its OKRs to align with ongoing community and outreach initiatives. Last meeting notes →Agenda, Oct 14th, 2025
The team worked on roadmap cleanup, focusing on removing stale issues and ensuring up-to-date priorities. Interest in Learning Academies has slowed, though Zeitlabs remains committed to advancing the initiative. Next step: organize a broader community review to gather feedback and reenergize progress. Latest meeting notes →Agenda, October 10th, 2025
The meeting confirmed the 2026 Open edX Conference location, reviewed the ongoing TOC elections, and highlighted WGU’s strong contributions with 300–400 PRs and new committers. Felipe Montoya presented an AI experimentation framework for Open edX, while Axim explored OpenAI funding options to support AI-related development. Regis demoed Sparkth, an open-source MCP server enabling AI-powered course creation and publishing, showcasing innovative external AI integrations for Open edX. Last meeting notes → TOC Meeting Notes - 2025-09-10
The Translation WG reviewed recent language performance drops after migrating to the openedx-translations project, noting that machine translations are active for all languages except Portuguese (Portugal). Eden Huthmacher led a GitHub board review to track ongoing translation efforts and priorities.
Action items and next steps were documented in the Translations Working Group page for continued follow-up. Last meeting notes → 2025-10-15 Translation WG Meeting
Sam Daitzman introduced the new Design Working Group, inviting community participation and topic suggestions for future sessions. He also shared Content Libraries product updates for the Ulmo release, highlighting new feature enhancements. The meeting closed with Design WG planning, encouraging members to contribute ideas and priorities for upcoming discussions. Last meeting notes → 2025-10-16 - UX/UI Working Group Meeting
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@omar Did you get the help you needed? If not, what do you need exactly?
@itsjeyd Looks like we still have quite the backlog of PR reviews… Is there anything more we could do to really fix this? What would it require? I am assuming that the main blocker is still time from core contributors & maintainers?
The partners as maintainers proposal from the core contributor summit is still being discussed at the TOC, so maybe that’s something to factor in? Do we have an idea of the size of the commitment we would need for this? And would there be other factors that would also be blockers, besides this?
@antoviaque More time from core contributors and maintainers might help, but I wouldn’t know how to quantify that.
Overall, maintenance coverage seems to be quite good. And for the repos that I’m handling, the speed with which PRs are reviewed and merged definitely seems to have gone up. At least for repos that are actively maintained – today I learned that some of them are actually seeking new maintainers, which explains why it’s been difficult of late to find reviewers for OSPRs against them. It would be good to expedite finding new maintainers for these repos.
On repos that are unmaintained, getting reviews from the Axim engineering team is usually quite quick and easy.
Some PRs still get stuck early in the process, when telling authors that they’ll have to send their changes through product review. But the new and much improved process was only launched a few weeks ago, so it’s probably too early to expect significant impact from it.
For edx-platform, it would be good to get @Michelle_Philbrick’s perspective. The repo seems to be officially maintained now, and has the largest number of core contributors out of all the repos in the openedx org. But maybe it’s still challenging to figure out who to ping for changes targeting specific platform areas? Or, since the repo does have so many CCs, maybe pinging the entire group (@committers-edx-platform) results in bystander effects? I can only speculate here.
Lastly, to make maintainers’ lives easier (and always have a specific person responsible for next steps to take with a given PR), maybe it would help to circle back to @braden’s idea from the CC summit and implement this bot?
I have a list of outstanding edx-platform PRs to discuss with Feanil. I’m not sure if the wg-maintenance-edx-platform is actively reviewing all PRs in that repo. I will check in with Feanil and the Maintenance WG to confirm, as well as who we should tag (e.g. @committers-edx-platform) going forward.
Thanks for asking. Not really. We need an “outsider” review for the translations documentation and error debugging. I’m repsonding to multiple quesitons, but at the same time having to maintain the several automation scripts in the GitHub - openedx/openedx-translations: Open edX Translation files in sync with Transifex repository which leaves little time to respond to new comers questions.
I think having better docs would ease the effort a bit.
This would make it easier to fix the issues without too much head scratching:
INVALID: translations/frontend-app-admin-portal/src/i18n/messages/it_IT.json
These translation keys for locale it_IT are structurally different from en:
lcm.budget.detail.page.catalog.tab.remind.assignment.modal.send.multiple.reminder:
INVALID_ARGUMENT_TYPE
FAILURE: Some translations are invalid.
Could we try to get a rough estimate by estimating an average time needed to review a PR, and multiply that by the number of PRs opened per month on average, to get an estimated amount of maintainer / core contributors hours? Since estimating that average review time is difficult, we could try a range of estimates, and get a sense of how that matches our current maintainers count?
It could also be good to estimate the size of the backlog by multiplying that same average review time by the number of PRs which currently need to be assigned a reviewer, or are waiting on a review from one?
It’s a good proportion that is covered (~80% of repos if I count correctly), but there are still 33 repositories without a maintainer - and that’s not counting the parts of the edx-platform that don’t have a maintainer, if any? (It will be interesting to know what you learn about the edx-platform coverage @Michelle_Philbrick - thanks!).
That’s good to know! It makes sense that the reviews assignation and time to merge must highly depend on the repository.
One thing that would be helpful would be to have a way to measure this for the different repositories - that could help spotting earlier where action is needed, like when maintainers become unresponsive and that new maintainers are needed.
That’s another dimension which could be helpful to measure: what are the statuses in which PRs spend the most time in, or get stuck in.
Not sure, as I don’t know if anyone has been working with translations lately. But I guess if it’s really an “outsider” that’s ideal then it could be anyone. Would someone bilingual be ideal? I’m not sure who reads these CC News threads so maybe a separate post on here or on our forum would be able to find someone who has interest.
Yes, and as of today it seems like that number is a bit higher even – looking at the Maintenance Priorities column I’m seeing a total of 42 repos that aren’t tagged as Maintained. That’s 22% of the repos listed in the spreadsheet.
It should be possible to use data from the Bitergia Pull Requests Efficiency dashboard for this. If we wanted to start with that any time soon, and do it systematically, it would be great if we could bring in someone else to help with this. My plate is completely full at the moment.
I’m not sure if any of Open edX’s other Bitergia dashboards provide relevant data for this.
Good idea! Just to confirm, by “average review time” you mean the amount of time that a reviewer would spend actively reviewing a PR (reading code, posting comments, etc.), and not the total time that passes from the time the PR is marked as ready for engineering review until it’s merged?
@itsjeyd Sure thing, it can go to someone else. Jill used to work on this, is there anyone else with some experience on anaytics and/or Bitergia we could ask to look at this?
Yes exactly, since it would be to check that we have capacity for the work itself, rather than the delays in execution.
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