Adopting, contributing, and committing - institutions are the backbone to the Opencast Community. Read how your institution can become part of that vibrant exchange of ideas and knowledge around Opencast Matterhorn, benefit from its continous development - and contribute to its sustainability.
Adopting Matterhorn - joining the Opencast Community
The Opencast Matterhorn project stems from an institutional need for an affordable, flexible, yet robust system to support the growing numbers of videos in academia. In order to be useful not only for project partners , the community is to provide feedback on insufficiencies Matterhorn has and enhancements it could do with. In this sense, deploying Matterhorn is more than merely using the software one of the projects under the hood of the Opencast Community is developing. It's part of a process where adopting institutions form the Opencast Community for Opencast Matterhorn to flourish from, because ideally, this will activate institutions to particpate in the further development of Opencast Matterhorn for their own needs.
Getting what you want by contributing to Matterhorn
What if you ran a pilot with Matterhorn and identified it to satisfy your institutional needs - except for that tiny little feature you can't live without? The idea is for you to help yourself and incorporate that feature, thus contributing it to Matterhorn and helping the community (of adopters) also. The process of how you can actually contribute (i.e. become a committer) is being described in the Opencast governance documents. It implies that there are various forms of contributing to the project(s) and therefore, various forms of commitment: Design, documentation, wiki-gardening, and coding of course are all activities that could earn you committer status. But what if you don't have any resources to do so?
Funding Matterhorn Development
If you don't have the staff, the time or the skills to work towards the functionalities you need for your institutions, there is an alternative: Find a committer to either help you with it or do it for you outright. Talk to committers about what your plans are and see whether someone might share the burden. Money to pay someone might be helpful, though barter transactions might be possible also.
Given the division of work in the project, this makes sense from an efficiency point of view also: Why should you pay for your developers learning curve with a part of Matterhorn someone else knows by heart and can work on more efficiently?
