2023 Open edX Elections - Candidatures

Announcements
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Full name: Felipe Montoya

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Title (1-5 words)

Strengthen community ownership and co create a better platform for 10K organizations.

Goals summary for the 2023 term (<40 words)

My goal as a TOC member would be to push for the mechanisms and incentives that can empower the community players to collaboratively build a product that is the best fit for tens of thousands of organizations to provide high quality online learning.

Details

The Open edX platform has been evolving over the years, starting from a solution that best served the needs/pains and business case of a single organization (a very special one), to a handful, to perhaps hundreds. I believe there is an opportunity to make a huge positive impact by serving the needs of hundreds of thousands of organizations worldwide, but in order to do so, the platform needs to be steered towards a more decentralized model, in which there is:

  • A deeper understanding into what those needs are, specially in the areas where the platform is not meeting the expectations.

  • A robust learning core that defines the main functionality and architecture and that governs the stable extension points using well established standards for data and interoperability.

  • An extensibility model that allows and incentivises a larger number of contributors to create additional features, extensions, integrations with other services, etc. and a centralized place for these extensions to be discovered and distributed.

This will certainly take much longer than one year, but this initial transition period is key for our community to grow stronger as we figure out the appropriate governance models and the ways to move in the right direction.

Relevant experience

As a community contributor

Back in 2012 I enrolled in a course in edx.org. The quality of that course blew my mind. For the second course run I became a teaching assistant for the MOOC. The next thing I know I was opening a PR fixing the spanish translation of the platform. It only grew from there. I started attending calls with the ops teams from edx and getting more involved in the community.

After some time contributing, I was honored to be part of the pilot program for the Core Contributors program. I am extremely happy to see how well it has progressed since then.

At eduNEXT

After getting my feet wet with the project it also became my main work. I co-founded eduNEXT, a company that specializes in the Open edX ecosystem. Our software as a service approach helped us gain a tremendous insight into the needs of thousands of organizations that we supplied Open edX with. Both those that succeeded and those that failed have taught us a great deal. Recently this kind of experience became the basis of the hooks extension framework that we worked hard for in the last two years.

Talks and conferences

Time commitment

I have already committed to work 20h/Month as a core committer and in the event of being selected for the TOC I think it would devote most of that time into this responsibility.

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