Name: Inventing Together: Collaborative Product Strategy in the Open edX Ecosystem
Start: 2026-10-08T17:30:00-0400
End: 2026-10-08T18:00:00-0400

All sessions are available online except round tables and special activities.

Inventing Together: Collaborative Product Strategy in the Open edX Ecosystem

Thursday October 8, 2026 5:30pm - 6:00pm EDT

8 - Dining Room 6 - 6th Floor

ID: 33996

As open education communities step into a critical role on the frontlines of disseminating knowledge as a public good, the challenge extends beyond creating open resources to designing sustainable, collaborative systems that ensure their relevance and impact. This session explores how the global Open edX community offers a compelling model for “inventing together” through a community-driven approach to product strategy and governance.

Open edX is an open source teaching and learning platform used by millions of learners worldwide, with more than 2,000 active instances and a robust network of contributors spanning institutions, organizations, and countries. Stewarded by a nonprofit, the platform reflects the values of openness not only in content but also in its development and decision-making processes. What makes Open edX particularly distinctive is its investment in a formal product management organization—an uncommon feature in open source ecosystems. This model brings together nonprofit staff and community members to collaboratively shape the platform’s roadmap, aligning contributions with shared strategic priorities.

This session will examine how the Open edX product management function operates as a bridge between vision and execution in a distributed, participatory environment. Attendees will learn about key practices such as gathering and synthesizing user input, reviewing and prioritizing product proposals, and ensuring that contributions align with long-term goals. Central to this approach is a commitment to learner impact: decisions are guided not only by technical feasibility or contributor interest, but by the potential to improve teaching and learning outcomes at scale.

We will also explore the challenges inherent in building a product organization within an open source community. These include balancing openness with strategic coherence, navigating diverse stakeholder needs, and maintaining momentum across a decentralized contributor base. At the same time, this model presents significant opportunities: it fosters deeper community engagement, enables innovation across sectors, and creates a shared sense of ownership over the platform’s future.

By connecting this work to the broader open education ecosystem—including organizations like OEGlobal and initiatives such as MIT Open Learning—the session highlights how open source infrastructure can strengthen global efforts to expand equitable access to knowledge. Participants will gain insight into how collaborative product strategy can serve as a mechanism for resilience and collective thriving, supporting the conference’s call to catalyze human connection, creativity, and curiosity.

Ultimately, this session invites attendees to consider how similar approaches might be applied in their own contexts, and how open communities can work together to design systems that not only share knowledge, but actively sustain and evolve it for the benefit of all.

Speakers