Abstract:

Executive summary
Founded in 2007, the Opencast Community is a global community addressing all facets of academic video, thus providing a framework for institutions to look for guidance, best practices and exchange of experience. The community also supports a number of projects with the overall goal of facilitating the management and the exchange of audiovisual content. Among these, Opencast Matterhorn is the most influential one at the moment. It is an international cooperation of 13 partners to develop an end-to-end, open source platform that supports the scheduling, capture, managing, encoding and delivery of educational audio and video content.

Opencast and the Opencast Community
In 2007, talks between a number of American and European universities resulted in the creation of the Opencast Community to promote the idea of open video in academia - with openness referring to the technology used and the content being created. Today, the community ties hundreds of institutions and individuals.
The community provides a framework for institutions, individuals, and companies to discuss matters relevant in the context of video production and dissemination, with a focus on lecture recording. The Opencast Community also gave rise to a number of projects: Among these, the most important cooperation is certainly the Opencast Matterhorn (Build) Project, a community source project funded by the Mellon foundation and the Hewlett foundation which started in July 2009.
Opencast Matterhorn – The Build Project
In 2008, the core of the Opencast Community consisted mainly of universities who had already developed solutions for the management of lecture recordings and 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. Some of them incorporated proprietary technology, some were limited with respect to the ability to capture and recording technologies, some were unable to scale due to manual intervention needed.
To fill the gap with requirements the community had collected at the same time for a video management and lecture recording system, Opencast Matterhorn was launched out of the Opencast Community as a community source project. Matterhorn is to become an open source management system for academic video, mainly to organize, record, handle and distribute lecture recordings, providing users with tools to engage with the resulting rich medium beyond the mere consumption. The cooperation will resolve into a community-driven Open Source project at the end of the funding period for the community to take Matterhorn into the future.

The paper will introduce to the idea of Opencast shortly and will introduce Opencast Matterhorn as an Open Source solution for the management of video in academia

Keywords:

Open Source, cooperation, collaboration, community, lecture recording, video, podcast, rich media.