2023 Open edX Elections - Candidatures

Full name

Xavier Antoviaque

Picture

Title (1-5 words)

Adopting good open source practices

Goals summary for the 2023 term (<40 words)

Push for:

  • Community ownership and open source good practices

  • Better transparency

  • Increased collaboration on common projects, and more core contributors & maintainers time contributed

  • Better communication and involvement of operators, educators and learners

  • Improve the election process further

Details

1. Community ownership

Help shift the project to a more collaborative governance. We need to complete the transformation resulting from the shift of the project leadership from edX/2U to tCRIL. The project can now adopt better open source practices, allowing more involvement of the larger community.

2. “Open first” approach

Default more often to transparency for all discussions, agreements and documents affecting the official project.

Many documents and discussions in the project are public – but many are also kept private. As Karl Vogel puts it in “Producing Open Source Software”, a widely recognized compilation of open source good practices:

3. More collaboration within the community

…rather than isolated solitary projects that duplicate each other’s work, or rely on edX/2U or tCRIL to do the work we need. We need our organizations to design, build and fund projects with each other.

We also need to make it easier for core contributors to have the availability they need, by contributing more time to core contribution & maintenance – and have this work prioritized.

4. Operators, educators and learners

Help to develop better communication & feedback channels with operators, educators and learners, to integrate more the opinion of the actual users of the project.

We currently don’t have very good means to reach out to educators, learners, or even most of the operators – the community is spread over many instances, few aware of what happens in the larger community or the project itself. We need to develop ways to spread information within the larger community, as well as get more direct feedback and discussions about the project.

5. Improve the election process

Iterate based on the experience from this election and feedback.

Relevant experience

Open edX contributor since 2013

I joined the Open edX project as an early contributor - I had the privilege of contributing the project’s first merged external pull request, right after the project was published as open source. :stuck_out_tongue: I am an avid MOOC user, a learner on multiple Open edX sites, a teacher of the Open Source Masterclass MOOC, an operator at OpenCraft, a core contributor and a current member of the TOC.

One of the reasons I’ve started contributing was to give back to a community which had given me a lot as a learner. Little did I know, that the project and its community would come to alter my life path even more. I’ve been enjoying trying to make it up to the project ever since, by contributing to it.

OpenCraft

Part of my approach to improve the project has been through founding OpenCraft. It is a service provider company created with the goal to help Open edX sites operators to fully benefit from the open source model. By contributing the code of improvements our clients need to the project, we guarantee the quality and longevity of the work ordered, and ensure that our approach remains compatible with the evolution of the project. This has also allowed our clients and us to be prolific contributors to Open edX, since day one in 2013 – the open source model allows everyone to better benefit from the work done by others, accelerating the development of Open edX.

Core contributor program & TOC

The healthier the project and its governance is, the better this works – which is why I’ve helped to create programs like the core contributors. Over the last 10 years, I have hoped and pushed for the type of changes that are happening to the project since the 2U/tCRIL split – so I feel some responsibility for helping the project mature and adopt proper open source practices, now that it can do that!

Lately, besides making sure that we at OpenCraft keep contributing the majority of our work to the platform, my contributions as a TOC community member and core contributor revolve around:

  • Governance - helping to define, discuss and implement processes, like the TOC elections, but also participating in improving code & product review processes of contributions
  • Project management for the core contributor program – organization of sprints, helping getting contributors unblocked, and informed about each other’s work

Open source advocacy

I am also a long-time contributor of free software communities: I am a former board member of April, the main free software advocacy organization in France, I have initiated the Ryzom.org campaign, and I co-developed the free software game Card Stories.

Time commitment

I currently dedicate ~20h/month on average to contributing as a TOC member and core contributor, and I expect to continue dedicating a similar amount of time to the goals and activities above if I’m elected for 2023.

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