## Full name
Andrés González
## Picture
## Title (1-5 words)
Bring the voice of the community to the TOC.
## Goals summary for the 2023 term (<40 words)
Increase the value of the Open edX brand in benefit of the community. Review the internal processes to consider community priorities. Create spaces where the community can market their contributions. Consider students, authors, and site operators in the UI design.
### Details
Encourage the participation of the community in the activities to bring Open edX to the top of the LMS market.
There is a growing community of small companies or individual contributors that offer services based on Open edX. Despite their size, they can bring valuable experience and knowledge to improve the platform. Many of them do not participate in the meetings and are unknown to others. This does not mean that they shouldn’t be considered. The Community, in tight alignment with tCRIL should create mechanisms to encourage these initiatives and bring them to the core of the platform, no matter the size of the contribution. Even small activities can make a huge impact. The main reason for this limited participation is that their scarce resources are dedicated to operational activities. The Community, led by tCRIL, should increase the value of the Open edX brand, as a powerful asset to attract customers to these small organizations to help them grow. We should increase the position of the Open edX brand in the ed tech market to leverage contributors. For example, search for “Moodle alternatives” and count how many results include Open edX and, if it’s there, in which position of the rank.
Review the internal processes (e.g., product roadmap, deprecation, marketing, etc.) to consider the community priorities.
Deprecations, enhancements, new features, marketing activities have a huge impact in the customer base. Arguments like “edx.org does not use this feature” should not be enough to decide if the rest of the community is not considered. Whenever a feature is removed, a barrier is set for those who use it to upgrade the platform to the latest version.
Propose the creation of common spaces where community members can offer their contributions to the platform, like a marketplace and product directories.
There are many contribution opportunities, not necessarily related to the core of the platform. XBlocks, Tutor plugins and themes are just a few examples. The ability to market these add-ons could be an incentive to many small contributors to continue working in improving the ecosystem. Centralized spaces, like a marketplace or a plugin directory could encourage new contributors and help them get the funds to assign development efforts to increase the ecosystem.
Increase the relevance of end user experience (students, authors, and site operators) in the design process.
Students, course authors, teachers and site operators are the users that spend most of the time in contact with the platform. Most of them are non-technical people and are in the end those who evaluate how Open edX performs. Their point of view should be in the top priority of all initiatives related to the platform. Processes that require access to CLI, modification of text files or Django admin panel should be gradually replaced by options accessible from the user’s web interface. Waffle flags, JSON inputs in the advanced configurations should be replaced by more friendly options. The platform should add more customization mechanisms without changes to the code base.
## Relevant experience
Andrés is co-founder of Aulasneo, a verified Open edX service provider. Aulasneo offers Open edX as a service since 2016 to education institutions, NGOs and corporations. In addition to Open edX, Aulasneo developed Panorama, an analytics system for Open edX as well as an e-commerce integration based on Wordpress. Andrés is a core contributor and active participant of the community.
Andrés has an honor diploma in Electronics Engineering from the University of Buenos Aires and a MD in Management of Technology and Telecommunications Services from the University of San Andrés. He has 25 years of experience working in large multinational companies related to technology services. Andrés also held a PMI’s PMP certification from 2005 to 2021, as well as the PMI-ACP certification from 2016 to 2021.
## Time commitment
I plan to dedicate around 20hs per month to the TOC activities.