During the late November 2025 to mid-February 2026 period, the Governance Working Group — now operating under its asynchronous-first model — advanced three main projects:
The communication tools evaluation (#132) was nearly complete, with a community discussion of the findings currently ongoing in the forums.
The Notifications Admin MVP proposal, aimed at improving how the community gathers feedback, was updated based on TOC input and entered community review on Confluence.
Meanwhile, Cassie Zamparini began populating a GitHub project board with tasks for the Open edX Handbook migration from Confluence to Open edX Docs, having already completed the structure definition and feedback-gathering phases.
Need Better Ways to Get Feedback? (#124)
Issue #124 originated from a May 2024 retrospective where community members — including @mariajgrimaldi, @ali-hugo, and @cassiezamparini — reported difficulty collecting feedback from the Open edX community on surveys and initiatives. In response, OpenCraft developed a Notifications Admin MVP proposal, which was revised based on Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) feedback by December 2025 and aligned with upcoming Release Notes capabilities 1. By January 2026, the proposal had been fully updated and entered community review on Confluence, where members were invited to comment 2.
Agreed next steps:
Community members to review and comment on the Notifications Admin MVP proposal in Confluence.
Finalize an updated proposal based on community and TOC feedback.
Open edX Handbook (#128)
Issue #128 tracks the creation of a centralized Open edX Handbook, led by @cassiezamparini. The effort follows a phased approach: Phase 1 focuses on defining and validating the handbook structure, while Phase 2 will involve iterative content development in 4-week cycles with Core Contributor volunteers. As of early 2026, Steps 1 and 2 of Phase 1 — defining the structure and gathering community feedback — were completed, and Step 3 (incorporating that feedback) was in progress 13. By approximately January 2026, @cassiezamparini had begun adding tasks to a GitHub project board to kick off the migration of content from Confluence to Open edX Docs, signaling the transition toward Phase 2 2.
Agreed next steps:
Continue populating the GitHub project board with migration tasks.
Complete Phase 1, Step 3 (incorporate feedback into the structure).
Set up the handbook space in Open edX Docs and begin content migration.
Begin Phase 2 iterative content development cycles once Phase 1 is finalized.
Evaluate the Communication Tools We Use and How We Use Them (#132)
Issue #132 tracks an evaluation of the communication tools used by the Open edX community. @ali-hugo completed several tasks from this project in January: cataloguing current tools, researching tools used by other communities, testing Discourse Chat, and documenting findings. The final step — sharing recommendations and collecting feedback — moved forward with a forum discussion on Discourse 1.
The recommendations proposed replacing several proprietary tools with open-source alternatives: Slack → Zulip, Confluence → Discourse Wiki, Google Workspace → Collabora Online / Nextcloud Office, Google Meet → Jitsi, and Google Forms → LimeSurvey. Community feedback surfaced several concerns: the current Open edX Slack account is free, so switching to Zulip could actually add friction for organizations already using Slack internally (especially via Slack Connect); migrating Confluence content to Discourse Wiki would require significant effort to preserve page hierarchies, with questions about whether the benefits justified the cost; and there was a broader observation that Slack is often used for discussions better suited to the forum, suggesting the community should first reconsider usage patterns — encouraging more use of the forum for visibility and long-term referencing — before committing to tool replacements 1