Here is an update about the Contributions budget for Q1-Q2 of this year:
To be able to continue targeting a company-wide sustainability ratio of 45%, we’ll need to limit the amount of time logged against the Contributions account to 913h.
Assuming that work logs for February are up-to-date, we’ve used up 446h of that budget so far this year. This means:
The remaining Contributions budget for March to June is 467h, which comes out to ~7.5h/month per CC.
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Note that the 913h cap only applies to hours logged against the Contributions account. CC work belonging to other accounts continues to be unaffected by this cap; it is only limited by budgets defined for the accounts against which it is logged.
So if you’re able to find 12-13h of billable CC work, for example, you can still do a total of 20h of CC work each month.
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The purpose of this thread is to collectively discuss how to best utilize the remaining budget:
So it would be good to get clarity on which of these projects we’d want to prioritize for the next few months – while making sure that individual CCs can continue to fulfill their recurring responsibilities that aren’t tied to any one-off projects.
@tikr Thanks for getting that discussion started! And even if it’s in the context of keeping a hold of the budget to keep it sustainable, I think discussing its use to ensure it is used consciously and meaningfully is a good thing. It is one of our largest budgets, so it’s worth making it count.
Also imho we can have the current thread public - there shouldn’t be anything that is private to a client in this thread I think?
Thank you for scoping this out. I have a few responsibilities.
Release Manager for which I have to spend ~1h bi-weekly for BTR Work Group and about ~10h near the release(every 3 months) to go through PRs and backport and merge where it is required.
I am maintaining GitHub - openedx/frontend-app-gradebook: Instructor grade book tool this doesn’t have much activity but as a maintainer, I wanted to add some improvement which I will stop till we have some budget. Reviewing and maintaining the repo can be cut down to about 2-3h a month.
@antoviaque Axim recently reached out to me and asked me to confirm the 20h/month commitment, which I did. Does this mean I should write back to them and tell them we can no longer commit to that?
Yes, this would be very helpful. I’m involved in a lot of projects right now and scaling it down to 7.5 hours will be tough.
From the results of the partners survey (highlighted in green on that page), it looks like we are going to switch to contributing 10% of Open edX-related work hours, which roughly matches the 900h budget for Q1-Q2 (@tikr we can adjust the Q1-Q2 contributions budget to match the decision on the partners budgets, when it is finalized and adopted).
In the meantime the commitment is a rolling one over 6 months, and since we are exceeding it currently, it should work out fine I think?
Our team average was 16h/month in Core Contributor hours per Core Contributor for the 2024 year, 22h in January, and 15h in February, so what do you mean that we are exceeding the commitment?
Perhaps. Let’s see what happens over the next two months and how much budget is available. I did already change the way I’m reporting to focus on the budgets and the average hours instead of per person budgets.
Ah, I understand now that the commitment standards for the project are being revised, and we’ll definitely be exceeding the new commitment level expectations, which are a percentage of hours rather than a fixed number of hours per month.
@antoviaque AFAIK we used to keep the company-wide sustainability target private. The first post mentions it. Do you still want to make the thread public?
@tikr Good point - I think it’s fine in this case; I wouldn’t necessarily make it a new policy, but since most of the current conversation has no reason to be private, let’s go for it. I will make the thread public.
One area that does seem likely to have a bunch of client details is the subconversation about workload for you @Ali@cassie - so I have split that out in a separate thread.
Will you be continuing as release manager after the last point release of Sumac? (Talking about sumac.3 which currently scheduled for release on Apr 9.)
Things might have changed but as far as I remember release manager didn’t use to be a permanent role. Maybe someone else in the community would be willing to take it over? It could be a temporary thing, with you taking it back up once we’re able to increase the Contributions budget again?
I don’t necessarily think that part of the checklist needs to be skipped completely. For the time being it would just be good practice to prioritize finding billable tickets needing CC reviews.
For ASU MoE you can filter by the upstream-review label to find tickets that have one or more upstream PRs linked to them.
We could probably also put some effort into:
Getting more consistent with assigning CC reviewers to tickets during sprint planning, if it’s clear ahead of time that a ticket will produce an upstream PR.
Becoming more proactive about pinging the team’s CCs for review on tickets that don’t have CC reviewers assigned but end up producing upstream PRs.
Makes sense, I was thinking about this for a while, I can take this as an opportunity to optimize the processes and see if I can somehow perform release manager duties in the given constraints and if not then I will pass on the role.
Context
This feature is part of a larger product proposal that is not expected to be implemented soon. The Arbisoft team has suggested that OpenCraft take on the portion needed for the MOOC release.
@tikr Just drawing your attention to the post above this one (Project to Consider Prioritizing) as it was moved here from a separate thread, so I don’t think it will notify anyone.
Thanks @Ali. Maybe I’m misreading your comment but I wanted to point out that the idea was not for me to make decisions about prioritization here
The ticket that we’re using for this thread/conversation is linked to the Contributions account, too. So if we were to centralize the decision making and try to come up with a global list of priorities that considers individual constraints of every CC, that would take a bunch of extra time out of the already tight Q1-Q2 budget for that account.
A more efficient way to move forward would be for each individual CC to:
Bring up the topics that they are – or could be – working on (like some of you already did).
Based on feedback from Xavier/Braden and others, decide what their priorities should be for the next few months.
Allocate hours to different topics based on priority.
If necessary, coordinate with other CCs to see if they have non-billable contribution hours to spare and would be willing to donate, so that more time can be spent on the topics/projects that bubbled up to the top of the priority list in the context of this thread/conversation.
For #3 and #4, it might be worth repeating that these steps are critical only for CC hours that would be logged against the Contributions account, as that is what the 913h cap for Q1-Q2 applies to. CC hours logged against any other accounts (billable or not) are bound by the budgets set for those accounts, not by the 913h cap for the Contributions account.
This is a great idea! I could definitely use additional hours if they’re available for the Open edX Handbook project. I know this is one project that needs to keep moving forward, but I’m also looking for community volunteers to lend a hand. I’ll be chatting with Michelle later, as she’s already offered to help.
The remaining Contributions budget for March to June is 467h, which comes out to ~7.5h/month per CC. 
