Matterhorn Project Sustainability Plan

Strategic Project Goals

The goals for the July 2010 – June 2011 project year are focused on three primary areas of action, all aimed at moving the project towards a successful and sustainable future, embedded in a vibrant Opencast Community. These goals reflect what we believe is achievable with the resources contributed from the partner institutions, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Additional funding is being sought from other funders to further the Matterhorn roadmap (see Opencast Matterhorn Vision for Year 2).

The strategic goals are:

• To encourage and support adoption and implementation of Matterhorn within core partner and additional targeted institutions to prove it’s fully functional within diverse institutional profiles
  
   
• To create an active community of practice and contribution around Matterhorn, to bring more resource to expand and enhance the product, provide distributed support, and evangelize the product and the community
  
   
• To further develop and enhance Matterhorn to meet the expectations of Matterhorn partners, adopting institutions, the wider community, and users (instructors and learners)
  
   
• Transition the development and management processes and infrastructure around Matterhorn to the Opencast Community by June 2011

To meet these goals, three major lines of action have been identified:

• Dedicate support for community adoption
• Extend the functionality of Matterhorn 1.0
• Create and implement a transition plan for the development and maintenance infrastructure around Matterhorn to a community governance model.

These efforts will require a combination of funding from institutions, 6 months of remaining project funds from the Mellon Foundation, and a year of Hewlett funds. These funds will be re-allocated based on meeting the outcomes set out in more detail below, partners’ institutional priorities and their ability to contribute, and the need to stretch external funding to ensure that critical priorities are met over the full duration of the transition phase.

The following sections describe the subset of goals attached to each of the three primary areas.

Community Adoption Support

Objectives:

• Target and support key potential adopters in their Matterhorn implementation effort. These institutional adopters may be targeted based on their ability to contribute to the Matterhorn requirements, size, skills, geographical location, and need.
• Provide technology and documentation support to the broader Opencast community and to institutions as they begin to install and implement Matterhorn on their campuses.
• Establish a wider community of knowledgeable technical staff who can participate in an ongoing and robust open source support model
• Establish an appropriate support infrastructure

Outcomes:

• Core community of adopting institutions (pilots or operational implementations); documented showcases and/or best practices
• Evaluate first implementations to guide further development
• Provide support for distributed and localized workshops / Bar Camps to be held virtually and within campuses and conferences
• In-person design and development sessions for the product development team
• Plan for an Opencast conference in the summer of 2011

General Resource Requirements:

• Technical staff for implementation support activities and documentation
• Programming staff to respond to application needs
• Communications and adoption outreach

Matterhorn Development

Objectives:

• Customize and extend Matterhorn 1.0 (Grant funds through Dec 2010)
  • Iterative design and development against Matterhorn vision (Appendix A) and feature list (http://opencast.jira.com/wiki/x/ywHf)
  • As necessary and driven by implementation needs, address performance, deployment, and integration issues
  • Incorporate emerging requirements from adopting institutions
• Continued development of Matterhorn
  • Continued development will be increasingly driven by the priorities determined by the resources available and institutions contributing resources
  • The overall direction of Matterhorn development effort will depend on resources contributed to “common good” priorities, collectively determined through an open source governance model (see Governance Transition below)

Outcomes:

• A fully functional, performance conformant 1.x release for early adopters
• Responsive product support
• Reference implementations for enterprise integrations
• Iterative releases for enhanced features rollout
• Contributions from institutions in the form of patches and added functionality
• Infrastructure and processes to support community contributions

General Resource Requirements:

• Development team including designers, software architects and Java developers, front-end developers.
• Project coordination and documentation 

Governance Transition and Community Sustainability

Objectives:

• Develop a transitional project structure to go from the current community source project to an Open Source model
• Develop a new governance model that is approved by the community for product oversight and sustainability after Matterhorn 1.x release
• Establish documented process to support community contributions and moving projects from incubation through to supported release
• Explore and identify multiple funding models, leveraging current and new partners and funders to support core infrastructure maintenance, community activities, and shared common services

Outcomes:

• Conduct meetings with other community source leaders to explore potential for shared common services
• Hold a virtual governance summit in late 2010 / early 2011
• Hold retreat for Executive Governance Advisory group to set goals and brainstorm options  

Resources

• Communications and events coordination
• Contributed from community and current partners – board responsibility and Advisory