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June-Nov 2025 - Activity - Governance WG

Summary

Over the past 6 months, the Governance Working Group has fully transitioned from the former Contributor Coordination working group into an async‑first Governance working group, with a new charter, using a GitHub board as its main coordination tool.

We advanced a notifications initiative aiming to get better feedback from instructors and learners, question into a concrete product proposal for a Notifications Admin MVP. We are currently adjusting its direction after TOC feedback, to focus on empowering site administrators rather than messaging learners directly.

In parallel, the group:

Governance working group Repositioning and Operating Model

During this period the former “Contributor Coordination working group” fully transitioned into the Governance Working Group, with an expanded mandate around project-wide governance and contributor experience.

  • A new Governance working group charter was drafted and iterated on in Confluence, then finalized via async review in September–October.

  • The working group adopted an asynchronous‑first model, retiring recurring meetings in favor of ticket‑driven collaboration and ad‑hoc calls when needed. This was announced to the community on Discourse and wired into sprint reporting.

  • Naming changes were completed: GitHub repo, forum category, Slack channel, wiki pages, and the openedx.org working group listing were all updated in October, coordinated with Axim and the Marketing working group.

This repositioning formalized the working group as a place to organize cross‑cutting governance initiatives (OSPR management, metrics, comms, etc.) and established async work and GitHub boards as its default workflow.

Notification Framework and Community Outreach

The working group used issue #124 as the main thread for “better ways to get feedback” from the wider community, which evolved into a concrete product track around notifications:

  • A first phase of the Notifications project targeted Ulmo (Dec 2025) and focused on an in‑LMS notifications tray driven by hard‑coded, event‑based notifications.

  • Recognizing that this would not support governance needs (announcements, surveys, elections), Ali Hugo led discovery for a Notifications Admin MVP, culminating in a public proposal in November and a follow‑up discussion with the TOC.

  • TOC feedback highlighted strong institutional expectations that site owners control all end‑user messaging. As a result, the use case is shifting from “Talk directly to all instructors and learners” toward “Give admins tools to reach their own users and help them surface governance‑related calls to action.”

The work remains active, but future iterations needed to reconcile governance communication goals with institutional control and privacy expectations.

Documentation & Handbook for Core Contributors

The Open edX Handbook initiative (issue #128) made tangible progress:

  • A redesigned information architecture for docs.openedx.org was proposed, reviewed, and accepted by the Docs working group.

  • In October, the main navigation was updated, including a dedicated “Core Contributors” section and improved quickstarts and “role guides.”

  • Follow‑up discovery focused on migrating and de‑duplicating Core Contributor content from Confluence into Docs, with GitHub boards planned to track migration tasks.

Separately, Core Contributor onboarding improvements (#116) remained identified but on hold, with clear evidence that new CCs still lacked a cohesive onboarding path and clarity on roles, hours and responsibilities.

OSPR Management, PR Workflow, and Metrics

A substantial share of the working group activity continued to focus on OSPR (Open Source PR) management and contributor efficiency:

  • Labeling automation: openedx‑webhooks was updated so that PRs from Core Contributors automatically received the core contributor label (#155, closed Feb 2025). Follow‑up issue #159 identified bugs: the bot sometimes ignored global CC status and removed manually added labels. Discussion with Axim clarified that CC data flowed from Salesforce; the group leaned toward fixing data and behavior rather than adding manual workarounds.

  • Finding PRs to review: documentation work (#146) aimed to teach CCs how to use Contributions board views to find OSPRs needing review, and to fold that knowledge into onboarding materials.

  • Old PRs and the CC newsletter: a new thread (#158) tracked “oldest PRs needing reviews.” Highlighting them in the Core Contributor newsletter demonstrably moved several stuck PRs, though the working group recognized a need to filter out PRs in a “Waiting on Author” state and to cover old PRs across the whole org, not only edx‑platform.

  • Single Responsible Person Principle (SRP): workflow design for an opt‑in PR bot implementing SRP was completed (#152, discovery closed). A follow‑up implementation ticket (#160) was opened to build and pilot the bot on a small set of repositories.

  • Kanban boards: the working group sponsored implementation of organization‑wide, automated Kanban boards for contributions (#157), with base configs merged and rollout to key repos underway.

  • Metrics with Bitergia: the “Core Contributor Metrics with GrimoireLab/Bitergia” work (#139) clarified how metrics like Lead Time and Time to Merge were calculated (all closed PRs, not just merged). The group investigated filtering strategies to exclude blended/funded work ([FC‑XXXX]/[BD‑XXXX] PRs and edX/CRL org members), recognizing that current metrics likely overstated community efficiency.

Taken together, these efforts pushed toward a more automated, transparent, and measurable OSPR pipeline, though several strands (labeling correctness, documentation, SRP implementation, dashboard refinement) still required follow‑through.

Communication Channels and Reporting

Two related proposals tackled communication tooling and reporting:

  • The working group scoped an evaluation of all community communication tools and usage patterns (#132) plus a follow‑on shortlist focused on open‑source, async‑friendly options (#133). Due to capacity constraints, both remained on hold as of September 2025.

  • A separate effort sought to merge the Contributors Meetup Async Update and the Core Contributor Check‑in into a single, clearer report (#144), responding to strong survey feedback. Early anecdotal evidence suggested that report changes and newsletter call‑outs increased engagement, but the working group still awaited a more systematic assessment.

Open edX Partners as Maintainers

The “Open edX Partners as Maintainers” initiative (#136) remained strategically important but unresolved. It proposed defining baseline contribution expectations for partners (time, repos, PRs) and formally recognizing maintenance work. By November 2025 this still awaited a final decision from the TOC, which is being actively worked on currently by the group.