OCA Open Live Sessions: Part One, 2024
A summary from our monthly discussions


Monthly OCA Open Lives

Since May 2024, our Executive Director has organized a monthly live session open to anyone curious about the Odoo Community Association. The goal? Share ideas about the future of the OCA, ask questions about OCA processes and governance, exchange knowledge and practices related to our common ecosystem around Odoo.

Each time, a dozen or so participants have attended the meeting, all being happy to join in the discussion. Several participants have even come back a second time, which was unexpected and really a good sign. It is heartwarming to see that our community is present in the whole world: we’ve had people from Japan, India, Italy, France, Spain, Belgium, Morocco, Nigeria, Argentina, Bolivia and Canada! Each session we try to offer a different time and day to allow more people from around the globe to participate.

It seems that the OCA contributors, members and sponsors want to get in touch and share their concerns and ideas synchronously, in addition to the usual asynchronous communication through PR’s on Github, emails on the contributors mailing list or on our Discord server.

Do you want to join us for our next session? We share our next sessions in our newsletter and on our social media ( ) Follow us there!

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Hot and recurring topics

Thank you to the OCA
A recurrent first message from the participants is simply to thank the OCA for existing. We take this opportunity to forward this thank you message to all the people who have given their time, money and energy to contribute and support the OCA for more than 10 years!

How to find what you need in the massive amount of OCA modules?
This is THE question many people ask. It’s easy to get lost in the list of modules available and it’s hard to know if a business need will be answered thanks to a bunch of OCA modules.

Here are some tips shared by the participants:

  • use Odoo code search

  • check the “sets of modules” content built by the OCA functional working group (not available on our website yet but will be soon)

As expected, we also discussed artificial intelligence. A contributor has made a prototype using Open AI to find an OCA module based on a chat bot revealing the business need: https://twitter.com/cetmix_team/status/1800211122089582862

How to get notified when an OCA module is available in the latest version?
Currently, there is no easy way to get notified, except by subscribing to the Github repository, this comes with the risk of getting a crazy amount of Github notifications in your mailbox as our community is very active. However, there is usually a pinned issue dedicated to the follow up on the migration of the modules inside the corresponding repository, one issue per version.

Subscribing to this dedicated issue might be a good idea. Example here: 


During the sessions, we also discussed the idea of having a bot sharing the news on the OCA website. This could be enhanced with the organization of a webinar by the author of the migrated module in order to promote the OCA modules and its contributors.

OCA modules documentation
We all agree that our OCA modules could be better documented. This is also a topic in the hands of the OCA functional working group but it’s still a work in progress.

Some people mentioned that AI could be a possible help to create  good documentation for the OCA.

When contributing code to the OCA, the PR’s are not merged quickly
This topic is also a well-known topic in our community. We have some statistics available on the CHAOSS website (https://cauldron.io/project/7956), the data there have not been refreshed since February 2024. We see that the median time to get an issue (including PRs) closed is around 200 days. 

However, it is probable that many first PRs are not compliant with the OCA guidelines and this could explain the delays (the contributor doesn’t come back because they have moved on to another project in the meantime). 

Another thing to keep in mind: it is very appreciated that new contributors asking for reviews review other’s PRs. Asking for a review could be considered as asking for a gift from someone.

We will certainly discuss this topic during our next OCA Days 2024 on the 30th September and 1st October in Liège. You can register here to attend the event.

Are there OCA guidelines about infrastructure to host Odoo for your customers as an Odoo integrator?
There are no OCA guidelines on this topic. Each integrator uses their own tools. Several participants mentioned Doodba. To go further on this topic, we expect a dedicated talk during the OCA Days edition in Liège. You can also discuss this question on the dedicated channel “infrastructure” on the Discord server.

Conclusion

We have been amazed with the quality of the exchanges we have had during the sessions. A lot more topics have actually been discussed, stay tuned for the next blog post on the Open Lives and don’t hesitate to join us for one of the next sessions!

OCA Open Live Sessions: Part One, 2024
Odoo Community Association (OCA), Rebecca Gellatly (OCA) 25 July, 2024
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