Author: gregorydlogan

The Opencast community is looking for release managers for
the upcoming Opencast 19 release (Feature freeze around November,
release mid December).

Note that the release manager’s job contains very little
technical work. Instead, they mostly focus on motivation and
coordination of the community during the release phase. The
role of release managers is described in more detail in the
Opencast development documentation:

https://docs.opencast.org/develop/developer/#participate/release-manager/

In the past, it has proven good practice to have two people
fill this job as co-release managers to help keep up the
process during vacation, sickness and in case of local
emergencies.

Please apply in this discussion thread, preferably within the next 30 days.

As interest in the international and German-speaking Adopter’s meetings wanes, multiple people at the last Opencast DACH conference have expressed the need for a meeting that goes more into depth in regards to the technical details, but also isn’t as development-focused or time-consuming as the weekly Technical Meeting, as well as a meeting time that is more comfortable for Europeans.

Therefore we are happy to report that the first monthly SysAdmin meeting will happen at the 25th of October at 3pm CEST, so Wednesday next week, at https://meet.opencast.video (password is “welcome”). This will replace all Adopter’s meetings for the foreseeable future (though it is planned to hold a special meeting every 6 months where the new major release of Opencast will be presented).

The target group of this new meeting will primarily consist of people administrating their own Opencast instances or who are interested in doing so, though some Opencast developers will also be present. The focus of the first meeting will be to develop the structure of this new meeting. The following topics of interest were already proposed:

1. A short overview of current information helpful to sysadmins like known problems, security issues, whether a fast update to the next minor update is advised etc.

2. Information on ongoing development projects in the community or major changes to Opencast that are planned.

3. Presentation of a selection of open pull requests where reviews or testing are needed, or changes that might be controversial where more input is required.

4. Coordination of testing efforts for new Opencast releases to increase quality.

This meeting is supposed to offer the opportunity for developers to get easy access to people actually running Opencast systems to confirm assumptions about usage or find someone who can test a specific integration, as well as a change for sysadmins to give feedback and discuss issues they are experiencing. For this we’re also considering to offer a space for discussions after the official part of the meeting is over.

Don’t hesitate to contact Katrin (ihler@elan-ev.de) or Freddy (vogt@elan-ev.de) if you have any questions or opinions.