Improving the readability of Core Contributor updates

Working Groups Core Contributors
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This topic was created as a playground to improve the formatting of the Contributors meetup Async Update and the Core Contributor Sprint Retro. The goal is to make the reports easier to read and to encourage more involvement from Core Contributors.

See the recommended updates in the posts below.

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Core Contributors Update: Jul 22 - Aug 4, 2023

Use the jump links below to view the section that interests you:

1. Working Groups Updates

Working Groups Calendar

1.1. BTR Working Group

Chair: @ali_hugo

:paperclip: Latest news

:memo: Meeting notes

1.2. Contributor Coordination Working Group

Chair: TBD

:paperclip: Latest news

:memo: Meeting notes

1.3. Data Working Group

Chair: @ali_hugo & @ali_hugo

:paperclip: Latest news

  • Funded Contribution updates:
    • BI contractor Rory is back for a few more weeks!
    • Redis Bus contract is still crawling toward completion
  • We’re pushing toward a Beta 1 with fully functional (no cat 1 or 2 bugs) pipelines for Ralph and Vector ingestion, Operator Dashboard, and limited Instructor Dashboard, tested at a scale of 300 million xAPI events.
  • Operator Dashboard has landed
  • Forum events are starting to land
  • Docs are starting to land
  • Thorny issues with multi-question submissions are being worked on
  • Jenna has gathered community input and use cases, as will be presenting a Product Proposal for Aspects at the next Data WG meeting in 2 wks (2023-08-09)!
  • Some ideas to get data and embed iframes in the LMS are proposed here WIP: get data with superset API to the LMS by Ian2012 · Pull Request #2 · eduNEXT/aspects-superset-aside

:memo: Meeting notes

1.4. DEPR Working Group

Chair: @ali_hugo

:paperclip: Latest news

:memo: Meeting notes

1.5. DevEx Working Group

Chair: @ali_hugo & @ali_hugo

:paperclip: Latest news

  • (2U ArchBOM)
    • Devstack bug fixes
    • Figuring out if we can reasonably measure how long it takes someone to onboard
      • this includes communications latency
      • results vary wildly (1 day to 20 days)
      • This includes non-technical onboarding issues like paperwork and getting permissions
  • DEPRing parts of paver/pavelib
    • paver update_db in particular wasn’t working, now we’re using make migrate more
  • Starting conversations around how to DEPR/move things from Open edX to 2U (like devstack)
  • Trying out Orbstack, which wins almost immediately for me for not having to allocate memory up front
  • Orbstack is not free. We’re looking into free alternatives
    • Docker Desktop is still free for independent devs. As long as Orbstack remains a drop-in for Docker Desktop, it may not be a huge deal for the community
  • Devstack images are starting to get built for ARM. the one for credentials is up, LMS, Studio, and others are getting close.
  • Tutor dev out-of-the-box is using crazy resources right now, read this for a workaround & a link to our long term fix if you’re interested: Workaround for high tutor dev memory usage in Palm and Nightly

:memo: Meeting notes

1.6. DevOps Working Group

Chair: @ali_hugo

:paperclip: Latest news

:memo: Meeting notes

Blockers or Calls/offers for help

1.7. Educators Working Group

Chair: @ali_hugo

:paperclip: Latest news

  • This month’s meeting was dedicated entirely to the panel discussion “The AI Era of Open Online Courses”.
  • Educators Working Group

:memo: Meeting notes

Blockers or Calls/offers for help

  • Looking for any and all documentors!

[etc for remaining groups]

2. Events

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 August 8 - Join the meetup here!
  • Friday August 18 - Update async
  • Details and draft agenda on the GitHub board

:speech_balloon: Anything to add?

If there’s anything else you’d like to mention, please let us know in the comments below.

1 Like
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Core Contributor Sprint Retro: Jul 22 - Aug 4, 2023

Here is a summary of responses for the end-of-sprint check-in. The full report is on Listaflow.

:stopwatch: Core Contributor Hours

A total of 228 hours were reported this sprint, down from 319.25 and 238.75 in the previous two sprints:
chart (7)
0 hours logged this sprint:
Abderraouf Mehdi, Adolfo R. Brandes, Andreas Grähn, Brian Mesick, Brian Smith, Carlos Muniz, Chintan Joshi, Dave Ormsbee, Dean Jay Mathew, Edward Edward, Esteban Etcheverry, Farhaan, Feanil Patel, Ghassan Maslamani, Igor Degtiarov, Ivo Branco, Jenna Makowski, Jesica Greco, Jhony Avella, Jorge Londoño, Juan Montoya, Kshitij, Kyle McCormick, Maksim Sokolskiy, Michelle Philbrick, Nicole Kessler, Omar Al-Ithawi, Pedro Cabral, Peter Koblyakov, Sarina Canelake, Sofiane Bebert, Stefania Trabucchi

:notebook_with_decorative_cover: Summary of responses

1. What did you accomplish this sprint?

Xavier Antoviaque

Feanil Patel

  • Updated API documentation
  • Making progress on some edx-platform Auth cleanup
  • Work with other Axim folks to start updating and moving the developer guide to the new documentation site.

Cassie

  • I presented the internal work our team is doing for HMS at the Core Product Working Group. There is general interest from the community!
  • I am in the process of setting up a call with HMS, and Jenna to see how we can align this work with the Modular Learning Initiative. Jenna will also present some of the new tools in the works to HMS.
  • I completed some design deliverables for the Marketing Working Group (the assets will be used at the LWMOOCs conference).

Ali Hugo

  • Attended the UX/UI Working Group meeting, and planned the agenda for the following one.
  • Attended the Core Product Working Group meeting.
  • Attended the monthly Scrum of Scrums Working Group meeting.
  • Reviewed the wireframes 2U is working on for the search functionality on the LMS.

Pierre Mailhot

  • Attended Built-Test-Release Working group meetup.
  • Attended Education Working group on AI.
  • Translated and reviewed strings for fr_CA in Transifex.
  • Reported a translation problem with frontend-app-communications not harvesting strings or being in Transifex.
  • Browsed through Slack.
  • Browsed through Discourse.

Zia Fazal
Continued adding further transformers for forum events and created this PR.

Felipe Montoya

  • Reviewed a filter contributed by Arbisoft for an enterprise feature: Sign in to GitHub · GitHub
  • Participated in the large instances WG.
  • Reviewed the ADR for the enrollment APIs for wordpress ecommerce.

2. What went well this sprint?

Ali Hugo
There was some nice sharing of UX ideas between the work done on the Studio search and on the LMS search.

Cassie
I had a successful response from the Core Product Working Group about the initial Product Work being completed for HMS. I look forward to seeing how this story unfolds :slight_smile:

Felipe Montoya
Seeing enterprise features of edx.org using openedx-filters is great.

3. What should we improve? Any blockers?

Nothing mentioned this sprint.

4. Do you need any help? Or is there anything you’d like to collaborate on?

Pierre Mailhot
Reported a translation problem with frontend-app-communications not harvesting strings or being in Transifex.

5. What do you plan to work on in the upcoming sprint?

Xavier Antoviaque

Zia Fazal
Will continue to add more transformers

Ali Hugo
I’ll be on leave for the next sprint.

Cassie

  • I plan to complete the HMS Custom Pathways Product Spec internally. I also intend to align our spec more or less to how the Product Specs are being drawn up in the Open edX Wiki. Once this is done, I can re-share the spec with community, and we can begin a proper discussion with HMS and the community at large.
  • I’m also going to see whether ASU Baobab representatives are keen to meet with Jenna re their project, and in turn Jenna will present some of the new Modular Learning Initiative tools.

Pierre Mailhot

  • Built-Test-Release Working group meetup.
  • Open edX Contributors meetup.
  • Ecommerce Next Steps update meetup.

:speech_balloon: Questions or comments?

Great! Please add any questions or comments you might have below. We’d love to hear from you!

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Hi @Natalia_Choconta and @Dean,

Firstly, thank you for posting the Core Contributor updates at the end of each sprint. I’m sure it takes quite a bit of time and effort, so thanks for that. It’s a great way to keep up to date with what’s going on in the Community. :raised_hands:

I’ve been thinking about how we could encourage more Core Contributors to read the updates and get involved in the forum thread - especially considering all the work it takes to put the reports together! I think it might help if we tweaked the formatting of the updates - just to make them easier to skim through and digest.

With this in mind, I decided to experiment using reports from a previous sprint. I’d like to run my suggestions by you and see if you think the formatting changes are worth the effort. If you think that they are, I would be happy to apply the “styling” to your content each sprint (although I’m not quite sure how this would work… we’d need to come up with a plan). The last thing I want is to create more work for you.

Please see the links to the current vs tweaked versions of the reports below:

Contributors meetup Async Update (Natalia’s update):

Core Contributor Sprint Retro (Dean’s update):

What do you think? I’d love to hear your feedback - both the good and the bad!

CC: @antoviaque as this might interest you too :slight_smile:

2 Likes
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Hello @ali_hugo ! Thank you for this proposal to generate a change in how we carry out the Contributors meetup Async Update. The new format seems very successful to me, it is quite organized, it can be read easily and it has all the information that we have been handling, so making the change will be easy for me.

Any questions I have I will let you know!

1 Like
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@Natalia_Choconta Yay, I’m glad you like the new formatting! I see you’ve already tried it out on the latest update. Looks good! :raised_hands:

1 Like
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@ali_hugo Thanks again for looking into this! I like the new presentation, for both reports - it’s more readable. A few ideas to take it further:

  • It could be nice to have more visual parts, like graphs, illustrations, etc. I.e. taking it a bit further away from a corporate report, and closer to a newsletter/magazine. It’s silly but when it’s pretty with eye candy, it feels less like work to read it ;p And it’s also a bit like the difference between an application nice pretty UX, and one that just piles up a bunch of buttons, even if both are technically as efficient.
  • On the content itself, what could we do to make it more appealing? Are there maybe some techniques from newsletters or journalistic writing that we could apply there? Like putting the important bits at the top, maybe grouping topics by theme, etc. The drawback of this is that it takes time, but it could be worth seeing if that’s worth it - after all it takes time for journalists to write about a topic, but that’s also what allows the information to flow, so the investment could be worth it.

@Dean What do you think?

1 Like
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@antoviaque I like those ideas! But before we put them into practice, I think it’s important to determine whether the reward is worth the effort. I’ve started interviewing a few CC’s about our processes, and the two people I have interviewed so far don’t seem to read these reports very closely. Some of the other feedback was that CC’s are confused about the difference between the two reports, and feel like some of the content might just be duplicating what’s already in the wiki.

I would like to hear from more CC’s what they think before we decide how to adjust the reports. That way, we can be more confident in whichever decisions we make.

Does that work for you?

1 Like
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@ali_hugo Yup, completely! I agree with the assessment, that’s precisely why we need to improve the reports :slight_smile:

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Sounds good! :smiley:

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Looks better thank you @ali_hugo !

2 Likes
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@Dean I think how you incorporated graphs in your previous update works nicely. :clap:

1 Like
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@ali_hugo Using your format now. No graphs today! Maybe next time :smiley:

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@Dean Your latest update looks great! I really liked the short intro about the conference. :+1: :south_africa:

1 Like