This presentation was from a talk I gave at the International Association of Technology, Education and Development conference in Valencia, Spain in 2010.

1. Opencast,
the Opencast Community,
and Opencast Matterhorn
Sally Hanford: The University of Nottingham (UK)
Björn Haßler : University of Cambridge (UK)
Olaf A. Schulte: ETH Zurich (Switzerland)

2. Co-ordination with national
initiatives:
The UK based Steeple Projects

3. Benefits and challenges of
participating in an international
collaborative project

4. • Opencast
• Opencast Community
• Opencast Matterhorn
• Steeple Projects

5. Opencast…
…is an initiative driven by higher education institutions to
empower…
• … institutions to make informed choices about capture,
processing, and distribution infrastructure for audio/video,
• … faculty to teach courses and share knowledge with their
students and learners worldwide,
• … students to access and shape media into a more meaningful
tool for learning,
• … everyone to easily find and engage with educational video,
audio, and other rich media...

6. Open as in...
Open
(Broad)casting
Source
Technology
Formats
Content
Exchange
Open
Video
Federation
Searchability
Legal issues

7. Opencast Community
Federation of institutions and people
• attracted to the Opencast idea
• exchanging ideas, experience, and knowledge
• committed to building an Open Source solution
putting into effect the OC idea
• opencastproject.org

8. Mission statement
The Opencast community is a collaboration of:
individuals,
HE institutions
& organisations
working together to:
explore,
develop,
define
& document….

9. ..best practices and technologies for management of
audiovisual content in academia.
The Opencast community also supports:
community-driven projects
to solve common issues in management of academic
audiovisual content.
These projects include:
open source software development,
such as Matterhorn

10. Matterhorn
<recording from Olaf>
Phase 1
Preparations / team building / “Iteration 0” (July 2009)
Phase 2
Kick Off (July 2009 – Sept 2009); Zurich Meeting
Phase 3
Matterhorn 0.5 (January 2010)
Phase 4
Matterhorn 1.0 (July 2010)

12. Opencast Matterhorn consortium
• UC Berkeley
• University of Nebraska-Lincoln
• Northwestern University
• Indiana University
• University of Saskatchewan
• University of Toronto
• ETH Zürich
• University of Osnabrück
• Cambridge University
• University of Vigo
• University of Catalonia
• University of Copenhagen
• Jozef Stefan Institute

13. Opencast players
• Opencast Community
• Opencast Matterhorn
• Base Camps
- Saskatchewan (Canada)
- Nebraska Lincoln (US)
- Vigo (Spain)
- Tel Aviv (Israel)
- Loughborough (UK)
• Steeple Projects
• Participatory Culture Foundation
• Bay Area Video Coalition
• OSS Watch
• University of Nottingham
• Columbia University
• Tel Aviv University

14. Activities
• Opencast Community
- Resource centre
- Mailing list
• Opencast Projects
- Miro / Open U
- Open Video
- Metadata / syndication
• Opencast Matterhorn
• Steeple & Steeple-BR
– Workshops, assemblies &
conferences for UK HE
community
– Mailing list, webinars
– Dissemination of best
practices in institutional
podcasting
Matterhorn UK Base Camp

22. ...Co-ordination with national
initiatives – The UK Steeple
Projects

23. Steeple & Steeple-BR…
• The projects main concerns are:
– Reducing costs for media processing and media management
– Making it easier to deliver media into channels important to the
institution, such as iTunesU and the web portal
– Supporting and documenting adoption of best practice for
sustainability of the architecture and to ensure longevity of
institutional investments

24. Steeple…
• Scoping, requirements, use cases
• Policies, processes, workflows
• Requirements for public access to video/audio
• Private access to video/audio via LMS or VLE
• Encoding engines
• Service management
• Training and support
• Evaluation and dissemination

25. Steeple…
• Integration of the encoding engines and creation of
encoding workflows
• Further development work to an online database to
monitor and track processes
• Creation of a demonstrator web based delivery system
for institutional podcasts
• Documenting of activities

31. Loughborough University Steeple…
UK Matterhorn Base camp

32. Opportunities to participate – Weekly meetings

33. Opportunities to participate - UI testing

34. Opportunities to participate
– JIRA (follow project progress / bugs / issues)

35. Opportunities to participate
– Steeple workshops

36. Other opportunities to participate
• Subscribe to Opencast/Matterhorn/Steeple mail list
• Contribute to project Wikis
• Download and try Matterhorn – or contact a base camp
to try it
• UK based people – attend a Steeple workshop
• Developers – checkout the codebase from svn repository

37. Challenges and benefits of participation
Challenges
• Time differences
• Physical distance
• Sometimes technically challenging
Benefits
• Widen your view of the use of video – it’s global
• Keep on top of most recent developments
• Community of experts

38. Steeple links
WWW
• http://steeple.oucs.ox.ac.uk/
• http://steeple.posterous.com/ (blog)
Lists
• https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/STEEPLE
Wiki
• http://www.steeple.org.uk/

39. Planet Opencast
WWW
http://www.opencastproject.org/
http://opencast.jira.com/wiki/
Lists
community@opencastproject.org
matterhorn@opencastproject.org
Communication
http://opencast.jira.com/wiki/display/MH/Communication