This is the recap from the meeting on 2021-12-21.
Topics discussed
Working groups
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Marketing — 00:05:13
The general consensus regarding the Open edX virtual event of December 14 was that the event went very well.
There are a couple of on-going projects that the marketing working group is working on at the moment.
One of the projects is a “meet the community” video series which they are currently in the process of filming. The goal is to put a voice to some of the folks working behind the scenes and draw wider interest in the community by hooking people in. People in this video series give a quick introduction about themselves, their role in the community, and what they are working on in quick little snippets of 2 mins at most.
There is another initiative around getting a brochure drafted in order to compare the Open edX platform in the LMS ecosystem space. The document is currently open for feedback in case anyone is interested in contributing some edits or thoughts.
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Release — 00:08:20
Maple is live
There were significant efforts put to tie up some loose ends, in a four hour call, to ensure everything is ready for the release. So major kudos to everyone who participated!If you have time, have a go at Maple. Try things out and let the release working group know if there’s any issues that were missed.
There will be a series of blog posts in order to announce Maple and its features. This significant effort is being put in order to incentivize people to upgrade their instances with each release.
Unfortunately, it seems like there’s little visibility inside edX about the Open edX releases. Fortunately, some efforts will be put towards raising awareness about named releases inside edX.
Additional MFEs were added in Maple. A lot of help was required with the new additions of MFEs; however, huge kudos to @djoy for the synchronous help provided to the BTR working group.
A Maple Retrospective thread has been created in order to collect more information regarding what went good and what could use some improvement.
The Maple release notes have been published as well! Be sure to check them out!
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Frontend — 00:16:50
There are no frontend working group updates.
However, there updates regarding the Node.js upgrade, so be sure to check them out below.
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Core Contributors — 00:16:50
No updates here as well.
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Data — 00:17:46
The working group meeting which should have taken place at the end of 2021 was moved because many members were away.
The data working group is looking to bring back Figures in Tutor. Figures is a light-weight analytics dashboard for Open edX instances.
It is maintained by Appsembler; however, they don’t necessarily run the latest version of Open edX so updating it to the latest named release has to be done by someone else.The data working group wants to update figures to the latest named Open edX release, in this case Maple. The data working group would be looking to release a Maple compatible version of Figures in the upcoming weeks.
The data working group discussed with Appsembler sharing some of the merge rights or making it easier for the community to maintain Figures.
There are more ideas regarding analytics and how to facilitate moving from Figures to a more involved analytics stack. Figures will be used also to test these ideas and develop them further.
Figures would not be included in the vanilla installation of tutors but would be installed as an additional plugin, if necessary. A tutor plugin for figures already exists; however, is no longer being maintained.
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Deprecation — 00:23:00
No updates were mentioned during the meeting.
The updates for different meetings can be found on Confluence.
Events
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General Discussion — 00:23:46
There are no talks about doing any virtual events between now and the possible upcoming live event in Lisbon.
Unfortunately, the decision regarding the event taking place hasn’t been taken yet.
However, some efforts are being directed towards the preparation of different talk topics.
Projects
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“New features” working group creation? — 00:26:57
Unfortunately, the owner of this agenda item wasn’t available during that meeting.
Based on the discussion during the meetup, it is expected that the working group’s creation is find alternative solutions to the deprecated tickets, specifically the Entrance Exam deprecation ticket.
There are questions regarding whether this working group would fit under the responsibilities of the Deprecation working group.
Unfortunately, it remains unclear what is intended/requested by this. Accordingly, this will be discussed in future meetups.
It’s important to see how the intentions of this working group and the evolving public roadmap align.
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Core Contributors Sprints — 00:40:00
The core contributors sprints have been on going for a couple of weeks now. Many core contributors have had the opportunity to attend the sprint’s meetup call.
The sprints have helped find some contribution time around the Maple release, fortunately.
There are plans of moving things slightly asynchronously and delegating parts of the sprints and their preparation to different working groups to provide better scalability.
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Node.js 16 — 00:34:35
Unfortunately, the work on the upgrade was stalled because the edX build infrastructure does not allow for an incremental upgrade of the Node.js version. Libraries are being upgraded. MFEs aren’t being upgraded, however, because edX’s deployment pipeline sets the Node.js version globally.
Sadly, the build infrastructure is proving to be quite difficult and will require some additional assistance from different edX teams, which will require more time.
Due to these complications, Node.js 16 did not make it into Maple.
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Django Backend APIs: Django Signal Events, Django Filters — 00:40:04
The filters pull request is still waiting on reviewers from the community, to ensure that things are as conclusive as desired.
The first filters are ready to merge by mid January in case no new community reviews are provided.
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xAPI/Caliper, OEP-26 — 00:43:01
No updates.
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DEPR impediments - any tickets that need real-time discussion?
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Entrance Exam - how can we remove this unsupported feature from the core? — 00:43:33
We need a representative of the Deprecation working group to know if the working group can take ownership of these issues.
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MFE Theming — 00:49:27
Work has continued to progress on the UX/UI side of things. Another review is expected before sharing the results with the community.
Collaborations might be expected from edX, OpenCraft and eduNext regarding MFE theming.
Initially, some technical barriers or limitations were blocking some of the progress. While they continue to do so, there are interests in starting discussions about the blockers once again as soon as all parties are back on board.
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Contribution Course — 00:55:30
A nice working session was organized where different members were available and significant progress was contributed.
More content was written on that day than in the previous months.
There are plans to do similar sessions again in early 2022.
Video Recording
The chat log can be found on the meeting’s agenda.
I apologize for the extremely last post.
Participants
@antoviaque
@BbrSofiane
@dave
@djoy
@Felipe
@jmakowski
@nedbat
@nizar
Next meetup
Tuesday January 11th at 15:00 UTC (Timezone converter).
Details and draft agenda on the Github board.