The Open edX Project is seeking more maintainers. The term “maintainer” refers to an individual or group of people who serve as leaders for a given component (a service or library composed of code and hosted on GitHub) of the Open edX platform. Maintainers provide both technical and community management. Historically, 2U has been the maintainer of most components in the Open edX Project. However, in February of 2024, 2U announced that it is reducing its maintenance footprint to a level that can be sustained by that organization. To continue to have a healthy and well maintained project, the Open edX community has been working hard to take on more maintenance responsibilities. Companies and individuals around the globe have stepped up to keep the Open edX project healthy. If you have not already done so, today I’m asking you to join that effort.
Thank you to the various organizations that have, over the past five months, taken on maintainership of more than 30 key repositories. With nearly 200 repositories in the Open edX organization, there’s still many maintainers roles to fill! . This spreadsheet outlines all the repositories that still need maintainers and their current priority to the project. Anything where the catalog-info.yaml maintainer column value is empty or set to group:openedx-unmaintained needs a new maintainer.
How can you become a maintainer? To be a maintainer you need to be a coding Core Contributor (CC) to that repo. But don’t worry if you’re not a CC on a repo, you can nominate yourself for both CC and Maintainership at the same time. If you’re not sure if you will pass through the CC nomination process, come talk to the Maintenance Working Group and we’ll help you develop a plan.
- Example of a rights expansion to become a maintainer
- Example of a combined CC and Maintainer nomination
What do maintainers need to do?
Overall, once the initial maintenance is done, most repos take only a small amount of attention on a regular basis to make sure it’s staying up-to-date. As the Maintenance Working Group coordinates major upgrades, you’ll have to make sure the repo(s) you maintain are ready to work with new versions of upstream packages and frameworks (eg. Python, Node, React, Django, etc).
So let’s recap:
- Find something you want to maintain on the spreadsheet
- Work with the Maintenance WG to become a CC/Maintainer
- Help us keep the Open edX platform as healthy and robust as ever!
Learn More:
- OEP-54 defines the Core Contributor role and processes
- OEP-55 defines the high-level maintainer roles and expectations
This is important!
Thank you for writing about this @feanil. We definitely need more members of the community to step up to help with the maintenance, we have a lot of gap to cover still from the maintainer roles 2U is quitting. It’s a good occasion to show that we can manage this change as a community - and for community members to have more impact on the Open edX project. So please read what Feanil wrote, and consider picking up a repo and becoming a maintainer of a part of the project.