Unfortunately, I won’t be sharing text overviews for the next couple of community meetups. Due to some personal issues I’m struggling with at the moment, I’m unable to consistently finish up and share the text overview.
This is delaying my posting of the recap, unfortunately. Accordingly, I’m choosing not to share the text overviews, for now, in order to better post the video recording 24 to 48 hours after the meetup.
Marketing:
-Main focus on the Open edX Conference
-Ongoing tutorial videos for new users
-Demo Open edX: eduNEXT is already working on that
-Open edX survey: Open until the end of March
Frontend:
-BTR working group has been recommended as the gatekeeper for new MFEs. Pending proper OEP for this.
-Frontend working group meeting time will change. There is a survey to decide the best time.
-Discovery on MFE pain points. Reaching out to several members of the community.
Data:
-Research on next-gen Insights
-Notes from the last meeting.
Product:
-Kick-off meeting during the conference
-Getting the community roadmap up and running will be the first objective of the wg for the first three months
-First milestone - Template for adding issues to the roadmap.
3. Events:
Open edX Conference: There will be a virtual event as well for the people that cannot attend the event.
Django events: One PR at a time. Seven new filters to be merged, 6 to go.
5. Improvements and blockers - Retrospective
1. Async channels seem kinda quiet. Is that because everyone’s humming along just fine?
Conclusions:
This might be related to the workload from each person’s main job.
The discussion around this topic should keep going in Discuss since it seems there is not a clear root cause nor an action point yet.
2. Getting feedback/reviews for OSPRs is as always a challenge
Conclusions:
It is difficult to find someone who has enough experience to review that. It could be useful to have a community expert directory to know who is an expert on what to reach out to the correct person: OEP-56: Architectural Advisory Process
People become experts without knowing they became experts. Building confidence is a point to be considered.
If you have done enough to get the community informed about the changes you are trying to implement and even with that, you don’t get enough feedback/reviews, you should trust your gut and go ahead. If it’s broken, someone will raise her hand and put a spotlight on it.
Encouraging people to review even if they are not experts is a great way to start acquiring expertise
Having reasonable deadlines in place for a review could be a good approach to encourage people to do it and also to resolve the blocker in case the lack of reviews and feedback is preventing the PR from being merged. At the end of that deadline, you should feel comfortable getting the PR merged.
Even if you don’t have the ability to provide an improving review it does not mean you can’t give a review
3. I’m difficulty assign something from BTR board to myself or moving issue assigned to me from in progress to Done. How we can improve these how I can perform these tasks myself?
Conclusions:
If you don’t have the right access to the repository where the issue is you cannot self-assign or assign that person. However, if that person comments and says “you can assign this to me”, that person will get the issue assigned.
Thanks for the extended notes, @jalondonot! I know from experience they’re not easy to distill. IMHO they’re very useful, though: scanning text beats scanning video any day of the week.
Marketing (@jmakowski):
-Main focus on the Open edX Conference
-Ongoing tutorial videos for new users are expected to be ready by the end of April.
-Open edX survey: Deadline has been extended 2 weeks, until the half of April. The results will be shared during the Open edX Conference.
BTR (@nedbat):
-Getting ready for cutting the Nutmeg release on Monday, April 11th. Nutmeg is going to be released on June 9th.
-Request for help: Dean is leading the testing effort. If you think you might be able to lend a hand, reach out to him! Testing Open edX release
Data:
-Unfortunately, no one from this working group attended the meetup. Hope to get your valuable insight in the next call @dave@mafermazu@jacatove@e0d@blarghmatey
DEPR (@feanil):
-All DEPR tickets have been migrated from Jira to GitHub.
-tCRIL and Racoongang will accelerate some of the DEPR work. This work will not impact the Nutmeg release.
-Mongo’s courses will no longer show up by default in Master.
Product (@jmakowski):
-First session during the conference. Hopefully, people that are not attending the conference will be able to join the session virtually! @jenna will provide the details.
-Open edX Roadmap first milestone. Getting an updated glimpse of the ongoing work all across the community: Sign in to GitHub · GitHub
-There is a new Wikispace for product management! https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/OEPM/overview?homepageId=3375235221
3. Events:
Open edX Conference: There will be a few talks that will be streamed. The details will be specified in the agenda of the event.
4. Projects:
Django events (@mgmdi - @Felipe): One PR at a time. 4 PRs to go out of the 7 PRs from the initial scope of the project.
5. Improvements and Calls/offers for help (@antoviaque)
“I want more visibility into the development/support status of components, especially MFEs. If a legacy frontend is being rewritten as an MFE, I think there should be a DEPR ticket for the legacy frontend from the get-go.”
Conclusions:
There is no clear nor a specific roadmap or approach for this but the issue is well identified and the working groups are open to any suggestions. The DEPR working group will discuss this at the next meeting to improve the visibility of what is being removed and what is replacing it.
The process for deprecating should be revisited considering that the real community using Open edX around the world is larger than the one that is actively participating on the community channels.
A deprecation digest might be a good idea. Improving the information radiators that are currently in place seems to be a good approach for this.
Deprecations should be included in the roadmap and prioritized in terms of user and product impact
"Discuss posts (Core contributors sprint & meetup) have helpful information, but I haven’t found the time to read through them thoroughly. So I should include that as part of my CC tasks.
I reviewed a PR (since it fixed an issue I was having) and then realized it already had an assignee on the Jira board (I then @ the assignee to let him know). What should we do in that case?"
Conclusions:
Tagging the assignee and letting her know you gave a review is the best approach for this scenario.
BTR (@nedbat):
-The Nutmeg branch got created this week!
-The testing process is underway
-Release notes on the way
-Request for help: Dean is leading the testing effort. If you think you might be able to lend a hand, reach out to him! Testing Open edX release
Frontend (@arbrandes):
-Recap from the last meeting.
-Adolfo will be leading the Node 16 Upgrade project from now on. Reach out to him if you have any questions about it!
-If there is a case where any of the current MFEs stops supporting Node 12 or Node 14, the BTR would consider moving the whole Tutor stack to Node 16.
2U is currently working on an automatic Snake Case to Camel Case conversion
frontend-platform is finally getting an upgrade to React international to version 5.
-Adam is working on a possible dependency licensing issue
Data:
-They hope to gather at the Open edX Con!
DEPR (@feanil):
-tCRIL and Racoongang will accelerate a lot of the DEPR work which will be included in Olive
Product (@jmakowski):
-First session during the conference. Hopefully, people that are not attending the conference will be able to join the session virtually! @jenna will provide the details.
3. Events:
-Open edX Conference: It is finally happening! stay tuned for news and updates at https://con.openedx.org/
4. Projects:
-Django events (@mgmdi - @Felipe): We missed the deadline for cutting Nutmeg. The remaining filters will be backported to Nutmeg and included in Olive.
-Open edX Documentation Restructure (@feanil)
*Request for help:
5. Improvements and Calls/offers for help (@antoviaque)
Improvements
“I wish there were a snapshot of the technical settings and feature toggles from the Maple release, so I could diff them nor the nutmeg release notes. (edx-platform technical reference — edx-platform Technical Reference documentation”
Feedback:
That particular Readthedocs site is generated from edX Platform. So, he should be able to go to the older masterbranch and just regenerate those docs locally.
“It was a little bit tough to onboard as there’s so many communication platforms, but the more I learned the more it all makes sense. The onboarding courses will be super helpful to future participants.”
Feedback:
This is already being addressed.
Calls/offers for help
"Not yet but soon I might want people to help me write config files related to Backstage into various repos. | @feanil "
" I would love to get an overview of the current work on frontend plugins. I’m trying to keep in touch with the latest changes. | @xitij2000 "
Feedback:
Adolfo will get in touch with him.
" I need help to think of new test cases for the Test Plan. At present there are only basic test cases for the Studio and LMS.What about unique XBlocks, plugins, devops, global admin, and other areas that we need to create test cases for? It would be great if people can review the test cases then add their suggestions to the SUGGESTIONS tab in the sheet. I will bring this up in the meetups too. | @Dean "
Feedback:
Probably, these missing test cases will be figured out during the testing process.
" I’m hoping that this blockstore PR gets merged this week or next week, and then backported to nutmeg | @pdpinch "
The Nutmeg testing process advance is around 58.1%. During the next days, the number of test cases will increase to widen the scope of the testing process.
Request for help: Dean asks for help to upgrade Tutor plugins. They require some collaboration from the community to test them. Dean has already reached out to Regis to clarify the next steps on this point. He also found some resources that might be useful if you are interested to help:
We need volunteers to upgrade the rest of the plugins. You can upgrade a plugin, and optionally you can also become the maintainer of that plugin for future versions!
They held the wg meeting at Open edX Con. It seems there were many newcomers that would help the group to work on the sprint 0 and have a clear work roadmap.
They finally held their first meeting during the conference!
Several interesting and deep topics were discussed at this meeting, such as the core of the platform and product definition, the decision process definition, and what the next steps are for this working group to push the product roadmap and ensure the discussion around it keeps moving forward. You might find the meeting notes interesting in case you did not have the chance to attend
If you are interested in participating, please do not forget to answer the survey Jenna created to determine the best time for the meetings to come.
3. Open edX Con:
There seems to be a consensus among the community that it went really well!
Xavier prepared a thread to gather some of the feedback people might have about the Open edX Con. Please let the community know how it went for you to make sure we keep improving this event which remains to be a key space for the community.
There have been 2 informal meetings, to get to know each other a little bit better
The members have different backgrounds and perspectives that could enrich the discussion
It is still at the introductory stage. No big decisions have been made yet.
It would be great if we can increase the engagement of the TOC members inviting them to join the contributors’ meetup from time to time. Xavier will bring this up to the next TOC meeting.
Last Wednesday was the 7th anniversary of EDUlib! congratulations to @sambapete and all the people involved
Members can volunteer to be reviewers and contributors to the How-To’s videos.
The first version of the videos is going to be done in each member’s Open edX instance, but for the second version, the videos are intended to be in the sandbox.
Each member will choose a video topic and start working on it.
Esteban has volunteered to provide support in a video comparison of Open edX and Moodle
The Nutmeg release testing process is going well! The progress is around 85%. Nevertheless, they still require help from the community to get this done by the end of the month.
Request for help: Dean Upgrading and testing the remaining work. They require some help from the community to achieve the goal of getting this process done by the end of the month. Please reach out to @dean in Slack to see how you can help!
The discussions they are holding are still in an exploratory phase. If they reach a more specific and detailed proposal on something, they will probably reach out to the community through Discuss or an OEP.
They are running a survey to set a meeting time that could fit a majority! if you are interested in contributing to this group, check it out!
3. Events:
Most of the Open edX Con videos have been released! watch them here
Mark your calendars to join us virtually on June 9th, 2022 between 10 AM and 11 AM (EST) in Gather to learn about Raccoon Gang’s K-12 use of the Open edX platform in Ukraine!
More info here.
4. Projects:
Django events and filters (@mgmdi - @Felipe): Few remaining PRs to be merged! the team will make sure they are properly backported to Nutmeg.
5. Improvements and Calls/offers for help (@antoviaque)
Xavier has prepared a great recap of what was discussed at this point of the meeting:
There’s now a public Google calendar for Open edX working groups. I don’t know who owns the calendar invite for the Contributors’ Meetup these days, but you can add “Open edX Working Group calendar” to the event, and it will show up on the public working group calendar.
Members can volunteer to be reviewers and contributors to the How-To’s videos.
-There have been several international events that the Open edX community did not attend as a group. There might be an opportunity to improve our presence in this type of event, as a community.
@jmbowman has a new front-end squad! they will be focused on maintenance tasks while they onboard but please let them know in case you have any good ideas of how they can start contributing and lending a hand to the community.
Mark your calendars to join us virtually on June 9th, 2022 between 10 AM and 11 AM (EST) in Gather to learn about Raccoon Gang’s K-12 use of the Open edX platform in Ukraine!
More info here. This will be the first of several monthly events to stay tuned!
4. Projects:
Django events and filters (@mgmdi - @Felipe): Few remaining PRs to be merged! the team will make sure they are properly backported to Nutmeg.
5. Improvements and Calls/offers for help (@Dean@braden )
Dean and Braden prepared a great recap of what was discussed at this point of the meeting:
If you think you can lend a hand to any of the core contributed that are blocked with their contributions, feel free to reach out to them.
The creation of the Open edX vs Moodle video comparison is in progress. Led by Esteban and Eden. This is the document where they have put the key information it should contain.
A list of How-To videos is available here. The idea is that everyone records the videos with the themes they select to collaborate on. Then the videos will go through a revision phase and, finally, they will be edited to give them the same visual identity.
Updates and testing of the Open edX Sandbox are in process.
The creation of videos that tell the story of Open edX is also pending.
2U front-end maintenance team is already working on maintenance tasks related to security issues and bugs. In case you’d like to collaborate with them or report anything, reach out to the Front-End Working Group. That work will be tracked in https://github.com/openedx/frontend-wg/projects/1.
This is the frontend-triage team tasked with evaluating incoming issues and review requests: Sign in to GitHub · GitHub
5. Improvements and Calls/offers for help (@Dean@braden )
@Dean and @antoviaque prepared a great recap of what was discussed at this point of the meeting:
Highlights:
@ghassan: “When I suggest a change to a repo (Open a PR). Which I don’t have commit history with, the tests won’t run, unless someone trigger them. I found that to be really unproductive for me… Specially when I can’t replicate the tests locally i.e. codecov. Is there anything to be done to enhance this experience?”
@sarina said it is a security matter. There is no way to change this policy, at least for now. It seems getting help from a maintainer or being a maintainer would be the proper approach to do it. Investigating how the CI infrastructure works could be something the community can take a look at, and it might be the next logical step.https://github.com/openedx/open-edx-proposals/pull/290
@Andres.Aulasneo: “K8s should have a dedicated space for collaboration. There are many things that are not working, or that need special consideration to implement.”
For now, taking a look and raising your hand in the Discuss thread where this is being discussed seems like the best approach.
If you think you can lend a hand to any of the core contributors that are blocked, feel free to reach out to them!
Not yet upgraded. Maintainer: Kyle McCormick)
Already upgraded to Nutmeg. Maintainer: Régis temporary)
Not yet upgraded but eduNEXT is working on it (Jhony). Maintainer: Régis temporary)