2025 Community TOC Election - Candidate Nominations

Community
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The community is called to elect three members of the new core advisory body for the Open edX project – the Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) – between now and September 29th, 2025. The three elected community representatives will work alongside the existing Axim Collaborative, 2U, WGU, and NSDC TOC members.

Note: In order to qualify for becoming a TOC member nominee, you must be an Open edX Core Contributor. If you are not a core contributor yet, you will need to pass the core contributor review process, which takes about two weeks. In order to complete the review on time, you will need to submit your candidature for the Core Contributor Program by September 15th, 2025.

The election process is described in detail in the TOC Community Election Charter.

Become a Candidate

If you would like to apply as a candidate for the 2025 Community TOC election, please post a reply in this thread using the candidate nominee template below:

Full name

First & last name

Picture

Headshot image

Title (1-5 words)

If you had to give a title for your plans as a TOC board member, what would it be?

Goals for the 2025 term (<40 words)

Focus on the program or projects you intend to work on during your term as a TOC member, for growing and improving the Open edX platform.

Details

Further description of your goals for your term as a TOC member, for growing and improving the Open edX platform, and of your planned projects. You can also include links or images to any relevant link or resource, including presentation or video material.

Relevant Experience

Describe any experience and/or skills that are relevant to the role of TOC member. It can be past contributions to the project or other open source or educational projects, but it can also be anything that will help you achieve the above goals.

Time Commitment

Roughly, how much time do you plan to dedicate to your role as TOC member, to help achieve these goals (rough monthly estimate)?

For Non-technical candidates

The role of the TOC is not exclusively technical. Any core contributor is eligible for election, including non-technical core contributors working as product and project managers, marketing experts, documentation writers, and UX/UI practitioners, etc.

Specialities

The three elected community representatives should focus their mission on representing the community as a whole, and will be classified within the following categories:

  • Operator & Core Community Representative - elected by the project’s Core Contributors and Maintainers
  • Instructor Representative - elected by all individuals producing or running an active course on the Open edX platform
  • User/Learner Representative - elected by everyone using the Open edX platform in any capacity

Nominations & Endorsements

Anyone can suggest a nomination, but to ensure a “do-ocracy”, each candidate needs to be posted or endorsed by at least one core contributor or maintainer who isn’t the nominee.

If you are a core contributor or maintainer, you either nominate a candidate, including yourself, or endorse a candidate already nominated by doing one of the following:

  • Clicking the “heart” button of the post(s) containing the nomination(s) you endorse
  • Replying to someone else’s nomination in the current thread, mentioning who you endorse

Community TOC Election Schedule:

  • August 29th, 2025: Nominations & voting registration opens
  • September 15th, 2025: Deadline for applying as a core contributor
  • September 29th, 2025: Nominations & voting registration closes
  • October 9th, 2025: Voting opens, ballots are sent to eligible voters, nominated candidates are announced with a link to their program
  • October 30th, 2025: Voting closes
  • November 13th, 2025: Announcement of the results
  • January 1st, 2026: Terms begin

Help Us Reach Out to Eligible Voters!

We need the entire community’s help to let all eligible voters know that they can vote. If you know any instructors, users, and/or learners of the Open edX platform, please help spread the word of the 2025 TOC election!

Questions & Comments

If you have questions and/or comments regarding this process, please email me at ehuthmacher@axim.org, so that we can reserve this thread for nominations only.

We look forward to your participation!

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Full name

Marco Morales

Picture

(Linked via profile)

Title (1-5 words)

Platform Alignment & Feedback Loops

Goals for the 2025 term (<40 words)

I’d like to help align community efforts around key platform areas by ensuring educator and user feedback is shared across working groups—and by identifying shared investment priorities to reduce overlap and avoid duplicative work.

Details

To improve the Open edX platform, I’d like to focus on building better ways to gather, organize, and share community feedback—particularly from educators, learners, course teams, and adopters. Recent (and upcoming) efforts to improve the product proposal process (ex: the feature idea submission category on discuss.openedx.org) are a great start, but hopefully other improvements can help us capture real-world needs and opportunities from platform users today.

I’m especially interested in exploring how we can structure platform conversations by key areas of functionality, potentially revisiting our product subgroup structure to better align with platform areas. This would make it easier to invite input from educators, marketing and business teams, developers, and operators on specific themes like extensibility, complexity, or end-user experience.

Our long-term health as a community platform depends on having shared signals about where the platform is strong, where it’s complex or fragmented, and where coordination could lead to better outcomes. My goal is to help build those feedback loops and enable more coordinated, transparent planning across the community.

Relevant Experience

I’ve spent many years working on the Open edX platform, generally supporting platform development through the product management or design functions. I’m also active in various working groups, though this shift toward supporting TOC level initiatives may benefit from additional WG engagement.

Time Commitment

Based on the goals drafted above, this is already something that has been a big part of my core contributor time, so I would expect that to continue. I would look for guidance form current and previous TOC members on suggestions for how to make the most of the term and whether dedicated time for projects or supporting TOC goals is helpful.

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Full name

Omar Al-Ithawi

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Omar Al-Ithawi for TOC
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Title

Open edX for Hybrid Learning in Universities

Goals for the 2025 term

Make Open edX ready for Universities for Hybrid learning. Open edX usefulness will decline and will be effecitvely out of busniess otherwise.

Details

Support essential features for classrooms.

Enable Instructor to Student communication.

Essential grading and homework features.

Classroom, collegue and campus awareness.

Fix minor issues such LTI UX that are well support in other closed source softwares.

Attendance tracking.

Native online virtual classroom support via essential tools such as Zoom, BigBlueButton, MS Teams.

Relevant Experience

I have the most diverse experience in the community as a Founder of zeitlabs.com, Acting CTO of Edraak.org, Staff Engineer and Tech Lead at Appsembler.com and Acting CTO of the National eLearning Center in Saudi Arabia serving all the 500 public sector departments.

I have served first-hand 100s of Open edX customers. I’ve led multiple international teams for Open edX project across the 5 continents.

I’ve first hand contributed to Open edX since 2014, I’d take credit for making Open edX available for the RTL market (estimated 30% of the Open edX market) and leading the gloalization of Open edX.

I’m a proud member of this community and have dedicated past dedacade of my professional life to make this technology better for both the community and the customers I’ve worked with.

Time Commitment

I will dedicate 25% of my time to manage this improvement by leading a unified cross provider plan.

To ensure dedication, I’ll handover my Core Contributor responsiblities to another engineer in my team.

Let’s do this!!

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## Full name

Stefania Trabucchi

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## Title

Making Open edX Matter: My Voice for the TOC.
Having worked with Open edX since 2015, I’ve seen the transformative impact it can have—but also the challenges we must overcome together. My goal in joining the TOC is to help shape a future where the platform is not only innovative but purposeful—where AI, learning science and user needs come together in a meaningful way. My goal is to bridge the gap between strategy and practice, and between the global community and the implementation of real-world solutions.

## Goals summary for the 2025 term

We are currently experiencing a period of rapid digital transformation. AI is reshaping workflows, attitudes, and business models. Automation is replacing many human-driven processes, and the job market increasingly demands micro-credentials, upskilling, and reskilling.
Open edX is uniquely positioned to meet these demands, especially for corporations and SMEs, if we continue to evolve it into a more accessible, modular and ready-to-use solution.
My aim in joining the TOC is to achieve the following:

  • Represent client needs and market trends, particularly in Europe
  • Highlight why open source is now more relevant than ever in public and government-led digital strategies.
  • Advocate for Open edX as the ideal solution for competency-based and academic learning models

As a long-time EdTech consultant, active Open edX contributor and committed voice in the open-source community, I can offer a valuable perspective. I strongly believe in elevating underrepresented voices, such as those of women in tech, and I am not afraid to ask difficult questions when necessary to move the project forward.

### Motivation

We all have a shared responsibility to guide Open edX into its next phase. This involves embracing AI, strengthening global partnerships and ensuring the platform aligns with long-term strategic requirements.
The TOC plays a critical role in this, both technically and in terms of how it frames and delivers value to the broader ecosystem. I believe open source is key to meaningful and sustainable education, and I would be honoured to contribute to this vision as part of the committee.

## Relevant experience

  • Managing Director at Abstract-Technology GmbH, a German EdTech company (since 2015)
  • Degree in Humanities from Freie Universität Berlin, Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies
  • Open edX Verified Service Provider since 2015
  • Deep knowledge of Open edX releases, architecture, and product strategy—both technical and business-facing
  • Proposed and launched the Marketing Working Group (2018) and the BizDev Working Group (2024)
  • Speaker at multiple Open edX Conferences
  • Active contributor to the Open edX platform
  • Open source advocate since 2002

A member of various professional networks, including the Berlin Python User Group, CPD, the European EdTech Alliance, Erasmus+ projects and Geekettes, among others.

## Time commitment

I can commit 5% of my total working time to the TOC for the 2025 term.
With a typical workload of approximately 50 hours per week, this equates to 2.5 hours per week, or ~12 hours per month.

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Full Name

Lacee Nisbett

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Title

Strengthening Foundations, Scaling the Future

Goals for the 2025 Term

Elevate system administration as a strategic voice in Open edX. Build sustainable, scalable platform operations through admin-informedUX, robust permissions, and cross-institutional collaboration.

Details

Open edX cannot scale without operational integrity. I represent the people who keep the platform standing—admins and system leaders translating community vision into daily practice. For the past four years, I have led Open edX administration at WGU, one of the largest institutions running the platform, with nearly 500,000 active learners.

I don’t just implement features—I help shape them. I have worked directly with internal teams and contributors like OpenCraft to test, validate, and operationalize community releases. I developed QA and rollout frameworks that allow WGU to adopt Open edX features at scale. As the internal SME for permissions, course authoring tools, and backend configurations, I’ve built systems that not only support our own operations, but could serve as models for scalable, community-wide testing and implementation practices. I’ve been tapped repeatedly by Axim for admin and course author feature feedback, and I currently serve as the SME for WGU and Axim’s cross-functional Open edX Community Team focused on joint development.

As a TOC member, my priorities would include:

  • Centering admin voices in design and development

  • Building stronger pathways for scalable permissions and role management

  • Strengthening testing, documentation, and rollout planning to reduce barriers to adoption

  • Advocating for backend and UX consistency across tools that impact instructors and system operators alike

Open edX is at an inflection point. To keep growing, the platform needs contributors who understand both technical systems and institutional realities. I bring 15+ years of experience in EdTech systems administration, and I understand how to turn vision into viable, repeatable processes.

Relevant Experience

  • Lead Solutions Administrator, WGU (primary Open edX admin since 2021)

  • 15+ years in LMS operations, governance, testing, and implementation

  • Collaborated with Axim on multiple Open edX feature pilots and roadmap feedback

  • Designed QA and rollout processes used to adopt Open edX features at scale

  • Admin SME for permissions, instructor tools, and platform configurations

  • Frequent Open edX conference attendee and community liaison

  • Active contributor of WGU’s Open edX Community Team, building shared features and feedback loops

Time Commitment

12 to 15 hours per month, with additional flexibility for roadmap work, testing coordination, and TOC initiatives

Specialty

Operator & Core Community Representative

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Full name

Felipe Montoya

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Title

Empowering Collaborators for Strategic Platform Evolution

Goals for the 2025 term (<40 words)

Focus on advancing key initiatives:

  • AI extensibility framework - a solid shared foundation to enable innovations and fast experimentation with AI.
  • A co-funding playbook to channel external investments into open features maintainable by the community.
  • The strengthening of the extensions ecosystem, discoverability, quality assurance, easy installability and in-app configuration layers.

Details

  1. AI Extensibility (baseline).
    Advance the new openedx-ai-extensions plugin as a provider-agnostic layer: clear APIs, events/hooks integration, privacy/guardrails guidance, and reference adapters/playbooks so sites of all sizes can adopt AI without forking core. Building on the work presented at the 2025 Open edX conference.

  2. Community Co-Funding Playbook (with Axim).
    Codify a repeatable mechanism where Axim collaborates with external funders and community implementers to land features in core or well-maintained plugins—modeled on the UniDigital experience (Spanish public-university consortium) that delivered capabilities like Aspects analytics and other platform enhancements.

  3. Extensions Ecosystem & Discoverability.
    Define a minimum metadata spec, verification criteria, and governance for a public registry.
    Strengthen new and existing discovery surfaces in the platform.
    The aim is frictionless install/upgrade while keeping upgrades safe for operators.

Relevant Experience

Open edX community member (12+ years). Core Contributor since the program’s launch in 2020; long-time maintainer and technical lead for extensibility (events/hooks) that decouples customizations from core.

Co-led community work around large-scale operations (co-chair of the Large Instances WG), focusing on upgrade safety, performance, and operability at national-scale government, university, and enterprise deployments.

First author and ongoing contributor to the AI-extensibility initiative and repository creation, aligning community efforts post-conference.

UniDigital: helped coordinate community delivery that fed open features (e.g., Aspects analytics) and a set of plugins/extensions later reused by others.

Time Commitment

I contribute ~20h/month as a Core Contributor and Maintainer and expect to continue at at least this level. TOC duties will be added to my responsibilities—without reducing my CC/maintainer work—and I’ll flex time upward during key cycles.

Specialities

Seeking to serve as Operator & Core Community Representative. I understand that the final classification is actually given by voters.

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Full name

Ignacio (Nacho) Despujol Zabala

Picture

fotocongresoGANDÍA6

Title (1-5 words)

Let’s make Open edX the reference LMS for any use

Goals summary for the 2025 term (<40 words)

I want to help make Open edX the best LMS choice for any use, being the voice of users in Open edX’s governance, as I have been in previous terms.

Details

I think that Open edX is the best LMS for massive online learning, but it is still very cumbersome to install and manage and still has a lot to improve as an on-campus LMS.

I have been bringing the user’s point of view as the administrator of big and small instances, that has also led a big development project, and as instructor of more than 20 MOOCs, to help with this improvement, and I think that it is worth having a non developer point of view in the TOC.

I also want to contribute to the consolidation of Open edX as a completely open and diverse open source project with a vibrant community.

Relevant experience

I am the MOOC initiative coordinator of Universitat Politècnica de València. We are members of edx.org with more than 150 moocs and 5 million enrollments and also have a local instance of Open edX for more local courses and first runs of the Edx courses, which we have been using since we started 2014. With it we have done several experiments, creating Xblocks and other developments that we have presented in several Open edX conferences (though we have not contributed them to the core). I have also created and run more than 20 different MOOCs myself.

I served as a TOC community member for the initial term, where I participated in the strategy-setting meetings held during that year, and in the development of the election process for TOC community members. I have also been a member of the TOC in the last term, were I have advocated for the integration of AI and the simplification of the installation and management processes. I hope I can continue working as a member of the TOC and make fruitful contributions.

I also lead an initiative with several universities from Spain to expand Open edX with 500,000 euros of European Union funding, which has funded several Open edX improvements, including a significant part of the Aspects development.

Time commitment

I plan to dedicate 5 hours per month to TOC activities, but I am open to dedicating more if needed.

Specialities

I fit in any of the three categories, as I am in charge of the operation of a big MOOC initiative and a platform, I am the instructor in more than 20 MOOCs and I have followed many MOOCs, having the certificates of more than 35 of them and a micromaster.

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Voting period will extend to November 3rd.

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Full name

Xavier Antoviaque

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Title

Keep Empowering the Community, Better Communicate with Learners & Teachers

Goals summary for the 2025 term

We need to:

  • Keep pushing for transparency, community-based governance and empowering contributors.
  • Keep accelerating the PR & product reviews, and more empowerment of the core contributors in unblocking them
  • We still need to increase collaboration on common projects, and the increases in core contributors & maintainers time contributed by the organizations that we have discussed this year still need to be clearly decided – which is something I would monitor closely.

Details

As an elected TOC member since 2022, I have proposed or co-sponsored proposals to adopt the following open source best practices, I would keep pushing for these types of initiatives:

Transparency:

  • Publishing an edited summary of the discussions and agreements taken at the regular TOC meetings
  • Suggesting and participating to the TOC Town Hall discussions at the conference

Empowering the community in the governance:

  • Opening the TOC elections to all, by allowing all users of Open edX to vote on the third TOC board community seat (other two: instructors & core contributor), and applying changes from community feedback
  • Establishing a way for community members to request questions, decisions or recurse on the Open edX project from the TOC - OEP-63

Improving the Core Contributor experience:

More details

1. Community ownership

We have kept making a lot of progress on these aspects the last few years, to a point where we are starting to see the benefits of having a more empowered community: there is definitely a lot of energy and work that comes from that, with new organizations and contributors joining. We can still do even better though, so we need to keep progressing towards a more collaboration, transparency and openness. We need to make sure we keep empowering community members with enough ability to make decisions, for example around reviews, to avoid blocking upstream work and contributions.

The project can adopt more open source best practices, allowing more involvement of the larger community - especially the end users, such as the learners and the instructors, which aren’t involved or consulted directly enough in the community.

2. “Open first” approach

We have also made some good progress on this, but there is still more we can do to increase transparency in discussions, agreements and documents affecting the official project.

As Karl Vogel puts it in “Producing Open Source Software”:

3. More collaboration within the community

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

There is also progress on this topic! We need to keep doing more, but for example the work of the Large Instances working group keeps pooling together more and more of our respective custom DevOps work, allowing us to share the maintenance burden, and benefit more from each other’s work. The product working group has also been a good place to discuss how to do more of our project together, and be more aware of each other’s efforts.

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.

There is an ongoing effort to reach out to the users (instructors, learners, admins) of all Open edX instances via a notification within Open edX (LMS & Studio), which I would keep pushing forward.

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 13 years, I have hoped and pushed for the type of changes that are happening to the project since the 2U/Axim 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 co-creator and maintainer of the Open Source Masterclass MOOC; 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 10-20h/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 re-elected for 2026-27.

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We have updated some key dates - see below:

Key Dates

  • November 3rd, 2025 - Voter registration closes

  • November 10th, 2025 - Voting opens

  • November 30th, 2025 - Voting closes

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Reference this blog for voter information: Vote in the 2026 Open edX TOC Community Election - Open edX