2022-09-28 Meeting notes

15 mins

Triage

@Dave Ormsbee (Axim)

• REQUEST: @Jeff Witt (Deactivated) is looking for who to talk to about scheduling, reminders, setting deadlines in groups, third party integrations with scheduling things.

  • ???

• FORUM POST: Create/update courses using an API? (Import/Export/creation)

  • Glib: have several clients who want to integrate their own CRM. But this was in Ginkgo/Hawthorn

  • Felipe: Ignacio at U Valencia does this

  • Dave: MIT, @Peter Pinch

• FORUM POST: Verifiable Credentials Design Work

• Pierre recently raised the question of LTI provider support in a recent forum post. 2U is also having its own investigations into LTI at a platform level, and tCRIL has a handful of roadmap items related to the effort. Do folks who are interested in LTI feel like they’re adequately informed about what’s going on?

  • Cosmonauts (Zach) and OpenCraft (Giovanni)

    • This is very focused on the LTI consumer and XBlock, but it’s being split out.

    • Conversation on Issues (add link later)

    • Nothing out there for LTI provider

    • 2U is not going to be pushing much here.

    • Glib: We’ve experienced implementing adaptive engine (ALOSI). Was working in Hawthorne/Ironwood. Client didn’t continue to use it after that. Two instances were used: one to provide content, one to do the …? Haven’t used in years, but possible use case.

  • LTI Provider (lit_provider app) functionality currently owned by cosmonauts at 2U (in theory, though they don’t know anything about it).

10 mins

Backstage Update

@Dave Ormsbee (Axim)

• Quick update on how to add new entries for cross-repo Components.

• What is a Component?

  • Feanil: For now, everything is a Component (vs. Systems or other things)

    • LTI might eventually become a System

    • Some of this high order grouping is still aspirational

    • Don’t worry if you’re wrong about what’s a Component–we can change later.

    • Ned: LTI sounds bigger/more vague than “component”

      • Feanil: Still feeling this out, some Backstage words are concrete, some very vague/freeform. For now, barring a good reason to not do it, everything is a component. The way the data gets pulled in gives us flexibility to change later.

    • Backstage expects Components to become parts of larger concepts. “These Components are owned by this team, and this System of components is owned by this team.” “APIs this System has, Components this System has”.

• Volunteers to add new repos/entries?

  • Example: xblock-lti-consumer/catalog-info.yaml at master · openedx/xblock-lti-consumer

  • Reference: https://open-edx-proposals.readthedocs.io/en/latest/processes/oep-0055/decisions/0001-use-backstage-to-support-maintainers.html#references

• Other high level Components?

  • Hard to know what are services, what are repos, vs. what are plugins. Can label with topics (e.g. “service”).

  •  

20 mins

Encouraging Arch Discussions

@Dave Ormsbee (Axim)

We have a guiding OEP, a forum space, some simple tooling–what’s the next step to encouraging discussions to happen?

• Robert: Need to know that discussions are happening. Howto doc?

  • Which ones aren’t being seen?

  • Ned: Discourse is the least tracked because there’s a lot of noise. No guide to filtering discourse notifications on what you care about.

  • Sarina: This was discussed as part of Maintainers work.

  • Open

    

    Robert: Put it anywhere under the Open edX Slack.

    • New wiki page with links from Slack?

  • Robert: Separate Problems:

    • Problem 1: How do people get informed about global discussions?

    • Problem 2: There isn’t a discussion when there should be.

    • Problem 3: People are hearing about the discussion but aren’t participating.

  • Ned: If a group of people have something to say to a larger group, do they know how to announce? Arch-BOM has a page to codify “How we Announce”.

    • Exact mechanisms were deferred in OEP-56

    • Arch-BOM table is a good starting point (for structure, style).

• How do people use Discourse?

  • Feanil: Gets notice on first post, subscribes to following groups (@Feanil Patel please fill in):

    • .

    • .

  • Sarina watches first post across the whole forums, but has filters after that (@Sarina Canelake: can you please fill in the details)

  • Alex: Can I subscribe to your Discourse newsletter? How do you use Discourse, how do you watch for Architecturally Interesting Things and structure your time so you can read the interesting ones. How do you raise questions? What do you watch besides Discourse? Blog post?

    • Sarina: If you’re not filtering, you’re going to be overwhelmed.

    • Office hours sharing meeting would be useful.

    • Ned wrote tools for this. Get in touch if they seem intriguing:

      • https://github.com/nedbat/dinghy

      • https://github.com/nedbat/gefilte

    • Glib: “a good approach for managing emails I use, and it seems to work Scaling Yourself • Scott Hanselman • GOTO 2012 “

Stale OEPs

@Ned Batchelder (Deactivated)

Comment on this PR:

• https://github.com/openedx/open-edx-proposals/pull/387

• https://openedx.slack.com/archives/C1L370YTZ/p1664303075668939