Proposal for admission to the Apereo foundation incubation process by the Opencast Matterhorn project The Opencast Board, representing body of the Opencast Community according to its governance model1 is seeking admission to start the incubation process with the Apereo foundation for the Opencast Matterhorn project. The board has therefore asked the University of Cape Town (Stephen Marquard) and the University of California, Berkeley (Oliver Heyer), members of both the Opencast Community and the Apereo foundation, to submit this proposal. The Opencast community is a collaboration of individuals, higher education institutions and organizations working together to explore, develop, define and document best practices and technologies for the management of audiovisual content in academia. The community shares experiences with existing technologies and practices as well as identifying future approaches and requirements. The community seeks broad participation in this important and dynamic domain, to allow community members to share expertise and experience and collaborate in related projects. In practice, the community therefore supports projects to solve common issues in management of academic audiovisual content as identified by the community. The prime example is the Opencast Matterhorn project, an open source software development project to develop video capture and management technologies that are of primary importance to the Opencast community’s members. Opencast Matterhorn is an open source enterprise level lecture recording system. The core of the system delivers functionality for scheduling, media encoding, editing and content delivery. The sofware is developed in Java using the OSGi framework to provide a distributed and scalable system, handling from tens to thousands of hours of captured lecturers per week. A webbased adminstration interface is provided along with a fully documented REST API which allows adopters and third parties to modify and add functionality. For lecture capture, Matterhorn provides capture agent software and third party devices and software are also available. Media can be viewed using a fully featured player, which can synchroniously play two video streams. User annotation and usage data can be collected from the player. The Opencast community was initiated by UC Berkeley in 2007, with the Opencast Matterhorn project kicking off as a funded project in 2009. Since 2011, Matterhorn has successfully managed transition to a communitysupported open source project: The project has seen a number of releases since 2010, with the latest 1.4 version being available since June 2013. 1.4.2 is scheduled for March 2014 with a 1.5 release later this year. Development work is carried by more than 20 committers2 . More than 30 institutions have identified themselves as Matterhorn adopters3 , with the number of actual users estimated to be higher 4 . The community has at least two annual meetings (“Opencast unconference”), ideally hosted in Europe and North America respectively; turnout for these has been satisfactory at around 50100 people. There are a number of commercial entities active in the community, either as service providers, hardware vendors or sponsors. The board therefore considers the transition to a communityfunded open source project 1
http://opencast.org/opencast-governance. https://opencast.jira.com/wiki/display/MH/Committers. 3 http://opencast.org/matterhorn-adopters. 4 Based on figures from the RPM hosted at the University of Osnabruck, Germany. 2
complete. However, it also recognizes the need for continuous efforts to ensure the longterm prosperity of both the community and the project. While we believe both are sound and viable today, we also acknowledge the limitations of small entities to master the challenges that come with communitybased cooperation and open source software development. Given the constraints of participating academic institutions especially, we consider participation in a larger community to be the most beneficial approach to these strategic challenges. Plus, there is a number of legal, financial, and organisational issues where we would like to benefit from experience other projects and/or communities have. The rationale for seeking these benefits with the Apereo foundation is evident: Both organisations have in common their support for and use of open source technologies while coming from a distinct academic background. This is also why we believe the Opencast community would be a valuable addition to the Apereo foundation in that it complements the offering Apereo holds for academic institutions especially: Given the strategic importance of audiovisual content today, an open source video management solution à la Opencast Matterhorn is crucial for institutions, (almost) equal to content or learning management systems. In conjunction with the opportunities of integrating these, we see Matterhorn as a strategic addition to the Apereo project portfolio and to higher education therefore. Throughout the process, the Opencast Community will be represented by the chair of the Opencast board: Olaf A. Schulte ETH Zurich
[email protected] Benjamin Hubbard (
[email protected]) from UC Berkeley and Andy Wasklewicz (
[email protected]) from Entwine are completing the Opencast working group. Opencast community website: http://opencast.org/. Matterhorn project website: http://opencast.org/matterhorn/. Matterhorn project wiki: https://opencast.jira.com/. Community/project communication channels: http://opencast.org/communications.
> The proposal should then be submitted to
[email protected].