Community Strategist and Program Lead
Building on 20 years of experience with open source communities, I design and optimize innovative strategies through contributors, open collaboration, crowdsourcing, and high-performance data and impact-driven teams.
EXPERIENCE
VallaBus – Open Data and Project Lead
January 2024 – Present
I strategically led partnerships with local organizations, identifying key areas for development and driving the creation of innovative multi-modal transport solutions.
Led the development of a user-centric web app, leveraging open transport data to enhance real-time decision-making for commuters.
In just a few months, I drove user engagement to new heights, with thousands of active weekly users VallaBus has become the highest-rated bus app in Spain, reflecting the app’s impact on improving daily commutes.
In my lead role I also managed the end-to-end project lifecycle, from ideation to launch, through strategic planning, agile methodologies, and stakeholder engagement.
I built and nurtured a thriving open data community, mobilizing neighbors and volunteers to generate new valuable datasets, leveraging my leadership in community building and collaborative innovation.
Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team – Community Strategist & Research Lead
January 2021 – January 2024
I successfully led the development and execution of the Community Strategy for the Latin America region. This involved overseeing the recruitment and management of a specialized team, resulting in transformative community projects across 16 countries.
In support to the leadership team, I led the transformation of HOT’s extensive regional strategies into a staff-ready comms, greatly improving organizational understanding and staff alignment with our strategic goals.
My leadership in data-driven approaches extended to conducting pivotal research on historical HOT disaster responses, OSM contributors and local knowledge edits, providing strategic insights for more effective future response strategies, and identifying key sustainability and risk factors, thereby guiding long-term strategic planning and organizational growth, as well as implementing a CRM strategy, significantly enhancing operational efficiency, monitoring, and impact assessment.
Furthermore, I played a crucial role in modernizing the OpenStreetMap Foundation’s community channels, leading the design of a change management plan, conducting in-depth community consultations and ensuring engagement and buy-in. Within the first year of the platform‘s launch, nearly 4000 users and 40 local OSM communities transitioned over.
Mozilla – Global Communities Strategist
March 2015 – August 2020
As part of the Open Innovation team, and leveraging Mozilla’s community networks, I drove and implemented strategies for Mozilla’s multi-stakeholder product and technology teams including Mozilla Support, Common Voice, Mission-Driven Mozillians, Firefox, Pocket, Addons, and Localization, which resulted in a significant reduction in cost, expanded reach, aligned collaboration, and increased contributors’ satisfaction.
Mozilla –Senior Community Manager
September 2014 – March 2015
In the Community Development team, I led the execution of community engagements, and leveraged my past volunteer experience founding programs such as Mozilla Reps or the Mozilla Spanish community, I optimized workflows, channels, and documentation which resulted in increased visibility of the contributors’ work, high-efficiency in administrative processes and tangible impact on organizational goals by external collaborations.
Fundación General Universidad de Valladolid – System Administration and Devops
June 2008 – August 2014
I grew the capabilities of the IT organization from legacy isolated machines to a full racked infrastructure using virtualization and industry-standard backup policies, increasing efficiency, and reducing overall cost. I upgraded internal and external websites to state-of-the-art technologies and designs, increasing the organization’s brand reputation
KEY STRENGTHS
Impact-driven
Stakeholder management
Storytelling
Strategy development
Program management
Community building
Data-driven
Project management
Languages
Spanish (native)
English
Trainings
TRIBE: Leadership
Debias Hiring
Project Highlights
LATAM Open Mapping Hub –2022
Led the Community Strategy around the org presence and support to the Latin America region, where I helped recruit and launch a staff-team that, in under 5 months, resulted in dozens of new community-centric projects, hundreds of positive new relationships developed in 16 countries and a longer-term Hub plan and model.
Building Common Voice –2018-2020
Designed a global contribution strategy for crowd-sourced open data collection and a self-sustainable community model. Through regular and focused engagements, the number of internal and external contributions was boosted by a factor of 15x, resulting in the biggest voice open dataset, allowing to kickstart the unlocking of the closed voice recognition industry.
OpenStreetMap Modernization – 2021 -2022
I supported OpenStreetMap Foundation with its community channels modernization, where I led the scope and design of a change management plan, drove community consultations and enabled community-ownership of the new platform. Within the first year of the platform‘s launch, nearly 4000 users and 40 local OSM communities transitioned over.
Mozilla Community Portal – 2019-2020
Led the development of the Mozilla Community Portal, a culmination of years of community strategy work and, in just 6 months, the portal reached more than 4000 contributors in 87 languages, 160 groups from 40 countries, 263 events, and +45K subscribers to the campaign’s newsletter. The portal activities and campaigns were recognized as direct value to Mozilla key products and services.
Mission-Driven Mozillians – 2017-2020
Led the modernization of Mozilla’s global communities aligning contributor motivation to organizational needs and priorities, and, by designing impactful opportunities for contribution, I unlocked Mozilla’s communities as a powerhouse of innovation. As an example – In the PlayStore Support Campaign, 431 volunteers replied to 2200 reviews in a week in 9 languages, or the Firefox Preview Bug Hunter Campaign with more than 500 issues filed and 8000 installs in just two weeks that were fundamental to launch this browser to the market.
Content Localization pilot – 2019
Based on past learning optimizing localization, I led a pilot to understand how to modernize our content localization strategies, which included external research and alignment with other organizations like Wikimedia.
The pilot helped understand how leveraging a more distributed review system together with machine translation can result in increased contributors engagement, experience and satisfaction, time-to-deliver, and huge cost savings. This work shaped the strategy moving forward in scenarios of low resources and increasing demand for internationalization.
Localization research – 2018
Lead an internal study to understand the health of localization communities, coordinating an external agency, introducing for the first time the concept of “health score” and bringing focus to languages that bring more impact to the products.
As a result, the localization team implemented a set of leadership agreements and role expectations that helped language communities to modernize their diversity and inclusion as well as be more effective.
Communities research – 2017
As part of our data-driven approach to revitalize participation by understanding our communities, I helped coordinate the contributors and communities research, connecting an internal and external multi-stakeholder team to generate a quantitative and a qualitative study on our communities.
The result shaped the community approach and strategy in the following years and informed the recognized “Open by design” strategy.
Volunteering & Contributor
Mozilla Reps Program – 2010-2020
I took part in the foundation of the Reps program, a community-led program of core contributors who can self-provide the resources needed to run activities to support Mozilla. It’s still the oldest living project at Mozilla together with Firefox desktop.
Reps keep supporting major Mozilla products mobilizing communities through campaigns and events, from the Firefox OS Launch, to the launch of every Firefox major release updates, to the Privacy Month or Web literacy. To date, 261 Reps have run more than 7K events, and reported 50K+ activities.
Mozilla communities – 2004-2014
I started contributing to Mozilla in late 2004 as a volunteer, supporting the efforts to localize websites (MDN and mozilla.org), being the Spanish content localized lead at the time.
I led the creation of the umbrella Spanish-speaking community “Mozilla Hispano” which grew from 7 founding members to hundreds of contributors in 20+ countries. I coordinated the efforts to define its governance, internal processes, tools, and infrastructure, that resulted into the most well known and impactful community at the time and it was key for Mozilla’s Firefox OS launch on the Spanish markets, including our participation at the Mobile World Congress 2013.
During this time I ran several public talks and events across Spain talking about Mozilla, privacy and open policies, as well as a podcast with more than 1000 subscribers.