OPENCAST, OPENCAST COMMUNITY, OPENCAST MATTERHORN AND THE COORDINATION WITH NATIONAL INITIATIVES – THE STEEPLE PROJECTS

1. Background
Spurred by the development of "podcasting" technology, the quantity, quality and use of the lecture recordings have highlighted video management as a strategic imperative for universities. Founded in 2007, the Opencast Community is a global community addressing all facets of this domain and supporting different projects, with the overall goal of facilitating the exchange of audiovisual content.

2. Opencast and the Opencast Community
In 2007, UC Berkeley's Educational Technology Services (ETS) initiated talks with various American and European universities about the status quo in lecture recording. The group soon called itself the Opencast Community which today ties approximately 250 institutions and more than 400 individuals. The Opencast Community provides a forum to discuss all matters relevant to the domain – technology, policy, and operational practices: also, it also supports a number of projects. Among these, the most important cooperation is certainly the Opencast Matterhorn (Build) Project.

3. Opencast Matterhorn – The (Community Source) Build Project
In 2008, the active core of the Opencast Community consisted mainly of universities who had already developed solutions for the management of lecture recordings and of other audiovisual objects. However, the evaluation of these programs had shown that none of the systems provided by itself the range of functions that the universities required.
To fill this gap, Opencast Matterhorn was launched out of the Opencast Community as a community source project. Matterhorn is being pushed ahead by a funded collaboration of 13 North American and European institutions to develop an Open Source video management system. In so doing, the institutions strive to meet the needs of the whole Opencast Community and thus ensure that the development of the product will find in the Opencast Community the backing necessary for its future development. For this purpose, the cooperation with other initiatives and projects is essential.

4. Cooperation with national and (other) international projects – Opencast and the UK-based Steeple project
There is a number of national and international federations and projects to foster the further development in the domain of academic video. The Opencast Community understands itself as an aggregator for these efforts, showcased in the cooperation with the UK Joint information Services Committee funded Steeple projects (led by the University of Oxford, the Open University, and the University of Cambridge, and including many other UK HE institutions). Members of institutions involved in the Steeple project have participated in a variety of ways to the international Opencast project and as a result have realised the benefits of international co-operation.

The paper describes the cooperation of the Opencast Matterhorn and Steeple projects and explores the challenges and benefits of taking part in an international collaborative project.