Full name
Xavier Antoviaque
Picture
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:
- Assisting the Core Contributor Survey, and the Core Contributor Summit Proposals that resulted from the survey. Many of the proposals have been implemented, or are being implemented: faster PR reviews response times & processes, core contributor commitments increases from organizations, documentation & on-boarding improvements, reporting form simplifications, tools evaluations…
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. 
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.