Good morning Open edX 
! I am posting this statement from my personal account, but it was written together with my fellow Technical Oversight Committee community members Xavier Antoviaque (@antoviaque) and Ignacio Despujol (@ndespujol). The opinions reflected here are our own.
As you may have heard, a new round of layoffs has happened at 2U in the last few days. As a consequence, many former 2U employees have left the Open edX community. We are saddened by this, like many in the community. Many of the people who were laid off were very active Open edX contributors, some of them for many years, a few since the very beginning of the project. Our first thoughts go to them: to lose one’s job is never a great experience, to say the least. We hope that you enjoyed our collaboration as much as we did. If we can help you in any way, either professionally or personally, please get in touch.
We are not in a position to comment on the reasons why these layoffs are happening. But what is very clear to us is that they are not a reflection of the health of the Open edX project in general, which is thriving. That being said, given the amount of work 2U contributes to the project, it’s important to consider the impact on the rest of the Open edX community.
First of all, we expect that 2U will remain a very important user of Open edX. The edX.org website still runs on Open edX, in no small part thanks to the work of hundreds of open source contributors. Even if 2U were not able to keep up with the current rate of upstream contributions, they would remain one of the top organizations to run Open edX.
Second, and perhaps most importantly, the community has made progress in preparing for this scenario over the past few years. Ever since the handover of edX.org to 2U, and the Open edX project to Axim Collaborative, more and more responsibilities have been shifted from 2U to the rest of the community. To the point that 2U now holds a minimal amount of responsibilities that are mission-critical for Open edX. All GitHub repositories are managed by Axim. All working groups are led either by Axim or outside contributors. There is now a public roadmap for the next Open edX release (Redwood, scheduled for June 2024) and 80% of the new features will be contributed by companies and individuals other than 2U. We have very healthy core contributor and maintainership programs in place to ensure that all aspects of the platform are properly managed. Even in the TOC, 2U members only have a minority vote. Last, but not least, Axim is financially self-sufficient and has enough budget to pursue its mission to improve access to education worldwide.
But then, and this brings us to our third point, we need to account for the fact that the floor has shifted beneath our feet. The rest of the community will need to make up for the decreased investment of 2U in the project. Thus, we must pursue our efforts to empower community members. While the mission statement of Open edX does not change, we should also consider whether we should adjust our current strategy to achieve it. But we do not need to take any drastic decision to completely overhaul the Open edX platform – any engineer would agree that this would be a terrible idea. Instead, we should strive to make the platform more extensible, such that it can be adapted to a wider variety of use cases. We must further improve our governance model to make sure that all contributors feel appropriately rewarded in proportion to their work. Every one of these ambitious goals is well in reach, because we are fully in control of our own future.
We need everyone from the community to become even more involved in the advancement of the platform. Which is why we are making a call to all companies that currently run and sell Open edX: we need you to rise to the challenge and increase your level of involvement. We need you to contribute to the project roadmap, to improve the frontend, to test new releases… Ask your employees to join a working group. If there are aspects of the Open edX platform that you want to change and improve, now is the right time to make an impact and share your vision with the rest of the community.
If, like us, you believe in the Open edX project, are interested in becoming more involved in shaping its future, and are willing to contribute some of your time or company resources to keep it well maintained, please write to ask-the-toc@openedx.org.
We are very much looking forward to working with you even more.
Xavier Antoviaque @antoviaque, RĂ©gis Behmo @regis, Ignacio Despujol @ndespujol, Open edX Technical Oversight Committee members
