Explaining the Open edX landscape

One confusing thing when I started working on Open edX was understanding what was the difference between open edx and edx.org, what harvard and MIT had to do with the project, what 2U was, axim colaborative, etc. I shared this problem with @antoviaque, and we thought that making a diagram could make it easier to understand the landscape and where OpenCraft fits into it.

Here’s a first draft I made with Mermaid.

triangles are learning sites, round corners are companies, sharp corner is Open edX

Here’s the code for it:

---
config:
  theme: mc
---

flowchart LR
    A("2U") -- owns --> B{"edx.org
    _the learning platform_"}
    C["Open edX
    _open source project_"] -- powers --> B & X{"_Other Learning Platforms_"}
    D("OpenCraft") -- contributes --> C
    E("Axim Colaborative") -- stewards --> C
    E -- contributes --> C
    E -- client --> D
    X -- client --> D

Any suggestions or clarifications are more than welcome. My hope is that we can add something like this to the handbook so it’s clear for newcomers and teammates as well.

Edit: Second draft based on @maxim 's suggestions bellow

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@daniel.valenzuela Great diagram! I ran into the same issue whenever someone asked me about my work.

My personal thoughts on the diagram:

  • client is the only “relationship” that is not a verb. Also not all the Other Learning Platforms employ us.
  • From the diagram it’s not obvious who owns the Open edX.
  • I would also add an optional area that would highlight that the primary tool for running the platform locally, and which is also used as a foundation for most deployment tools is tutor, which is not owned, afaik, by any of the orgs currently present on the digram :) You can extend this section with Grove and other tools if you can find any (e.g. I’ve seen platforms that are using GitHub - cookiecutter-openedx/cookiecutter-openedx-devops: Open edX Tutor on Kubernetes implemented with Terraform for deployments).
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Those are really good points! thanks @max

@daniel.valenzuela Great diagram, and good point! It’s true that it can be confusing at the beginning. It would be worth adding your diagram to the onboarding cours

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