Below find the candidates for the 2011 Opencast Board elections.
Authorized voters (those listed as "Primary Representative" for any of the Matterhorn adopter organizations) may proceed to log in and cast your vote. Voting will remain open until midnight Pacific on Friday, September 23rd.
If you experience any problems logging in or casting your vote, please inform Michelle Ziegmann at michelle@media.berkeley.edu.
Vicente Goyanes, University of Vigo
Qualifications
Vicente is and has been an advocate on the use of video resources for e-learning for many years. He led the team which developed UVigo current media platform (PuMuKIT) and media repository (UVigoTV) from scratch, a reference for many other Universities in Spain and other Spanish speaking countries. He has a strong technical background, and also has very good management & relationship abilities that will be very valuable for a board position.
Vicente has been an active member of the Opencast Matterhorn board since the beginning, his team hosted a “base camp” helping others to try and adopt MH. Vicente has fostered the creation of Opencast-ES, the Spanish speaking Opencast Community. The relationship that Vicente has with Latin America is also very important for the future expansion of the project: He has managed video resources and implementations in several Latin-American countries, and can communicate natively both with Spanish and Portuguese people. Vicente also works actively in European e-learning and HE media forums, like TERENA TF-Media task force, linking also to the European NREN community.
Position Statement
Opencast is evolving into a big international community but other country- or language-based sub-communities, with low visibility to the broad project, have also developed. That natural process happened before to the Sakai or Moodle communities and could provide many benefits if it is correctly fostered and managed. At present, those local Opencast communities could help to lower the entry barrier for new participants, and to adapt Opencast knowledge to local HE teaching variations. However, it is also very important to keep those “sibling” communities in touch with the Opencast broad community to avoid silo creation, to benefit from their feedback, etc. As a board member, with the experience of leading the Spanish speaking Opencast community (Opencast-ES), I could help promoting this multicultural vision and work to find the mechanisms to keep those future local French, Portuguese or Chinese Opencast communities deeply engaged with the Opencast Project.
While being a community, we must not forget that Matterhorn, our main project, has to offer proffesional quality services in many institutions very soon. If we are not able to comply with this challenge the future of the project will be in jeopardy. As a member of the board, I would share my long experience in campus-wide production systems to help to reach the requirements that type of deployments demand.
Mara Hancock, University of California Berkeley
Qualifications
I am the Director for Educational Technology Services at UC Berkeley. I have been in the educational technology field for over 16 years. UC Berkeley has been webcasting in some fashion since 1995, and actively supporting a growing program of open video and audio podcasts since 2001. I have been chair of the board of Opencast since it's inception and was part of the team that led that to its establishment, vision, and funding. I have also been on the board of the Sakai Foundation and the Fluid Project, both international open source projects from higher education for higher education. I am also a newly appointed board member for the New Media Consortium.
Position Statement
I am interested in being on the newly formed Opencast board because I believe that in the transition from being a grant-funded project to being a self-sustaining and institutionally supported organization requires a lot of focus, creativity, and care. As someone who has been involved in the project from the idea stage, I believe that I can continue to help guide and nurture the organization in such a way that it can and will continue to grow and thrive. I am eager and excited to bring new people and ideas into the organization, both as contributors and adopter, but also as leaders and board members.
The current board has done a lot to direct the community and project in the right direction for the transition. We have actively engaged with many vendors and other open source communities to identify strategic alignments and partnerships. These conversations will continue and hopefully will result in mutually beneficial collaborations and business arrangements that help with operational security and sponsorships.
The Matterhorn product and community is also maturing and transitioning. The board should maintain a focus on ensuring that resources continue to contribute to making that platform robust and that we continue to build creative solutions and integrations against the platform. We can do this by directly engaging with adopting institutions, encouraging a wide variety of contribution paths, and supporting the incredibly open community we have already created! We need to continue to look for other revenue opportunities. These will come from the in the form of operational dollars from adopting and contributing organizations as well as from commercial sponsors as they get off the ground. I believe innovation funds will also become available area in the areas where we can work closely with our academic colleagues, faculty, and researchers to identify deeper learning opportunities and capabilities within online and social learning models. It is in this area that I believe Opencast will really make a difference in transforming teaching and learning.
Brian O'Hagan, Columbia University
Qualifications
I’m currently Senior Technical Specialist at the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning. At CCNMTL, I guide the development of audio and video technologies that are used used to publish academic media to online course platforms and custom multimedia tools at Columbia University. I’m also the project manager of Columbia’s campus iTunes U and YouTube programs, where I coordinate content partnerships across 17 Columbia-affiliated schools.
I’ve worked in audio-visual educational technology for ten years, with a close emphasis on using interactive video for teaching and learning purposes. I earned a B.A. in psychology from Columbia University, where I also worked as a research assistant and independent researcher in Columbia’s department of psychology, studying social cognition and motivation.
Position Statement
Opencast consists of an amazing community of technologists, thinkers, and tinkerers. For almost four years now, I have been proud to include myself as a community member alongside all of you. Through volunteer efforts, we in the Opencast Community have been able to collect and share technical knowledge that has already informed numerous academic technology projects worldwide.
I believe that, as a community, we have only seen the earliest potential of what possible of our combined participation together. If provided the opportunity to serve, I would work to find improved ways for us to meet and collaborate, both online and offline. I would also aim to work with the Opencast Project team to develop a strengthened social media network, which might allow our institutional groups to stay in touch more effectively and more often. It is my strongest belief that it will be your ideas that can shape what is next for Opencast Community–I would simply like to be the amplifier for your voices.
It is my hope that through consistent and strategic collaborative efforts, we, as a community, may find new ways and increased opportunities to converge like-minded projects and ultimately build innovative, online & open source audio-visual tools together within Opencast. Thank you for considering me!
Rüdiger Rolf, University of Osnabrueck
Qualifications
I was involved in the Matterhorn project from the beginning. I worked in severals positions within the project: development, quality assurance, support and marketing of the project on conferences. I administrate our local matterhorn installation and because of that I'm very aware of the current state of the project and I know what is still missing in functionality. I would be the representative of the University of Osnabrueck which is the institution that currently provides most committers in the Matterhorn project.
Position Statement
Currently we are facing a great challenge to find new partners that will contribute to the project. It is essential that more people in the matterhorn users community understand that such an open source project will only work, if many people start to contribute experiences, manuals, ideas and even code to the project.
In the long term Matterhorn can be the base for great tools that deal with educational media. Viewers will get the opportunity to work with the recordings - to annotate, bookmark and even to reassemble them. Lecturers will have an easy to use browser-based tool for the post production of their recordings. New pedagogical scenarios for the use of videos in seminars will become possible in the future. We here in Osnabrueck have a long tradition in the development of lecture recording systems and I would like to be in the Matterhorn board to bring in our experiences and visions.
Bruce Sandhorst, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Qualifications
I have had a long career at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln with duties ranging from supporting faculty outreach efforts as a photographer, videographer, producer and software game developer to my last position where I had oversight of a group of 26 people supporting the use of technology in teaching and learning. I am the technical lead on a Global Classroom project which has involved travel to several other countries. In my new role as Academic Technology Liaison, I am interacting directly with Colleges developing collaborative strategies that enable UN-L to be more responsive to rapidly changing faculty and student technology needs for teaching and learning.
We have a team at UN-L actively participating in Opencast Matterhorn, and I have been a part of the Opencast community and Opencast Matterhorn since it's inception.
Position Statement
I gladly accept this nomination because I have experienced the Opencast community from the very beginning, experienced a group of people who have a passion for a shared vision, and have had a glimpse of a possible community based future that I passionately believe in. We are at a critical juncture in our Opencast community journey where we are removing the "training wheels" and seeing if we have learned how to steer and maintain our balance in the face of many challenges and opportunities that are in front of us. I have no doubt we are more than ready for the challenge and look forward to being a part of that future - in whatever capacity I am given to participate in.
My "position statement" is to provide authentic leadership and oversight to a group of incredibly talented people who do amazing things and to do my best to provide an environment that will encourage creative, forward thinking and action that will benefit the Opencast community.
Olaf A. Schulte, ETH Zurich
Qualifications
Olaf works for Multimedia Services at ETH Zurich where he heads the production and distribution group, in charge of audio and video content. My daily routine involves lecture recording, event (conferences, talks etc.) as well as film productions and their distribution. The resulting need for a consistent and reliable video management system was what made me welcome and support the Opencast initiative quite early and I was happy to join the project as a product manager in 2009. Today, my focus beyond the daily business is on the migration to Matterhorn at ETH and the concerted development of the Opencast Community and Matterhorn as a product. While outreach activities were my main focus (in Europe especially), I also have a vision for Matterhorn as a product I try to contribute to.
Position Statement
We will see Matterhorn serve as video management system for more - and larger - institutions over the next 12 months; while the overall number of adopters will still be moderate, their success will further increase the product's quality and visibility - and serve as a convincing argument for other institutions. The focus therefore for 2011 and 2012 is to help these institutions accomplish their goals with Matterhorn - a concerted effort of a moderate number of adopters(-to-be). Also, given the institutions' focus on their respective needs, we need to strengthen the communication between committers to make the best of the various migration efforts.
Based on their institutions success ("early adopters"), outreach activities should then target the "early majority" based on arguments of cost-effectiveness and flexibility especially.
Andrew Wasklewicz, Entwine
Qualifications
Andy is the co-founder and CEO of Entwine, the first commercial vendor to provide engineering, integration and technical support for the Opencast Matterhorn platform. As the CEO, Andy is responsible for managing the daily operations of Entwine. Andy has a proven management track record with over 16 years of experience in the educational technologies industry. Prior to Entwine, Andy held the position of Technology Architect for the Stanford University School of Medicine. During his four years at Stanford Andy was responsible for the technology designs of the state-of-the-art Li Ka Shing Center for Learning and Knowledge and led the product design and development of a lecture capture system that enables automatic capture and distribution of every MD course taught at Stanford’s School of Medicine. Before joining Stanford Andy was the Director of Technology and Innovation at the Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC), a non-profit organization with a mission of creating social change by enabling the sharing of diverse stories through art, education and technology. Andy played a an instrumental role in making possible BAVC’s connection to the CENIC high-speed network for the development of global high-bandwidth video transmission. Prior to BAVC Andy was the founder of the educational technology consulting firm DigEd, which served non‐profits, universities, and primary schools through the design, development and integration of new technologies. Andy began his career in technology at Arizona State University in the Information Technology and Instruction Support group.
Position Statement
In new open-source projects a board member must be capable of providing leadership, being an effective spokesperson for the project, and protecting and evolving the project’s vision to ensure its success. As a potential board and current community member for the Opencast Matterhorn platform I believe we must:
- Grow the Opencast community by embracing and encouraging new members (institutions, corporations, individuals) with varying expertise to create a rich ecosystem of new ideas, tools, and services around Matterhorn that ensure the long-term success of the project.
- Ensure Opencast remains dedicated to continuously designing, developing and documenting innovative and open media tools.
- Continue providing the Matterhorn source code with a liberal license that enables institutions, corporations, and projects to modify and integrate systems without fear of lock-in.
- Remain dedicated to promoting and integrating open standards that accelerate technology adoption, promote development and attracts new community members.
In my current role with Entwine, the first commercial Opencast Matterhorn engineering and support firm, I have the unique opportunity to work and interact both with institutions that have adopted Matterhorn and those considering platform adoption. This work provides me with a broad understanding of not only the technical issues of lecture capture but also the lesser discussed policy, copyright and intellectual property issues with which platform adopters contend. These interactions and my own personal expertise will help shape the recommendations I make as a board member for Opencast and will ensure that broader community needs are represented in Opencast’s development.
