Am Montag treffen wir uns 17:00 Uhr zu einer kleinen Besichtigung unserer Infrastruktur. Das Hauptprogramm wird am Dienstag und Mittwoch 9:00 Uhr starten. Tagungsort Rosensäle Universität Jena, Fürstengraben 27, 07743 Jena
Results are in: Two new members will join the board, both Katrin Ihler and Matthias Neugebauer have been confirmed by the community. And so have all sitting members.
Turnout was a desaster though with little more than 5% so the board has one agenda item already for their two-year term.
Finally, an update to our call for participation from November last year: Thanks to Katrin and Matthias, there are two new candidates for the Opencast board election. Find out more about all of them and expect an update on the voting process either here or on Opencast Announcements before the start of the summit.
Matthew Coupe
Matthew has led the Media Technologies and VLE team at the University of Manchester for the last year. The University of Manchester adopted Opencast in 2013 with lecture capture deployed in 365 locations on campus, with an additional 101 locations planned to come online this summer as part of a large campus redevelopment project. Prior to joining Media Tech, Matthew led the University IT function for professional development of pharmacy colleagues working in the NHS, and before that spent 10 years in a global Higher Education Awarding Body working with other Open Source projects such as .LRN.
Jody Fanto
Jody is the Director of Software Development at Harvard’s Division of Continuing Education (Harvard DCE). For more than 10 years, he has led Harvard DCE’s Opencast development team, which tailors Opencast to Harvard DCE’s specific needs, and contributes as much code as possible back to the Opencast community. He has been honored and proud to serve on the Opencast board for several years, and he brings 20 years of experience developing video processing systems for education.
Katrin Ihler
Katrin has been working for the elan e.V. since the end of 2017 and been involved in Opencast development and support for their clients from that point onward. She is somewhat active in the community and organizes the monthly SysAdmin meeting. At the elan she is currently leading the Opencast DevOps team.
Lars Kiesow Lars has been an Opencast developer since 2009. From 2014 to 2015 he had the position of QA and community manager of Opencast. This was followed by work for ELAN e.V., supporting universities with deploying and running Opencast as well as developing new features. Finally, since 2023, he is working in the educational technology team of Osnabrück University. Lars was voted into the Opencast board representing the group of committers in 2021, being re-elected as a regular board member in 2023.
Greg Logan
Greg has been an Opencast committer for more than 15 years, since the beginnings of the project. In that time he has done everything from help develop the original reference capture agent, to extensive work on deep internals of the core. He has been employed by Opencast directly as the QA & Community Coordinator since 2012, with a brief break for full time work for a major adopter. Since then he has also run his consulting firm Logan IT Enterprises, which works with Opencast adopters to build integrations and make changes directly to Opencast. First elected to the board as the committer representative in 2014, he joined the board as a full member in 2021.
Stephen Marquard
Stephen is Deputy Director of the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching at the University of Cape Town, where he leads the team responsible for learning platforms including UCT’s long-standing Opencast deployment. Stephen has been an Opencast contributor, committer and board member for many years. Current interests include updating Opencast’s LTI support through implementation of LTI Advantage, and prototyping AI-generated lecture summaries and learning materials generated from automated captions.
Matthias Neugebauer
Matthias has been actively involved in the Opencast community since late 2015, first as a developer and later as a committer at the University of Münster. He also founded shio solutions, a software company for multimedia systems that offers Opencast cloud hosting.
Rüdiger Rolf Rüdiger is deputy head of the center for teaching and learning at the University of Osnabrück. He was among the founding members of Opencast and a long time Opencast Board member. He worked as a developer on Opencast.
Olaf A. Schulte
Olaf heads “Multimedia Production” at ETH Zurich. Working for the Opencast Community since 2007, he was elected to the Opencast Board in 2011 which he chairs since 2012.
Dr. Carlos Turro
Carlos is Head of Media Services at Universitat Politecnica de Valencia. He has a long expertise in working and developing video for education, has participated in several European projects in this area and is also one of the managers of the MOOC UPV project. Within the Opencast community, he coordinates UPV work in the Paella Player and has served in the Board since 2016.
The 2025 Opencast Summit will be hosted at Graz University of Technology, Austria, from February 26 to 28. After our online summit in 2021, we are happy to welcome you in person in the city of Graz!
Registration
The registration is now open; confirmations will be sent bi-weekly.
The Opencast Summit 2025 will take place at Graz University of Technology, more specifically at Stremayrgasse 16, 8010 Graz („BMT building“).
If you arrive by public transport, the venue is a short walk from the „Neue Technik“ tram stop (line 6) or the „Mandellstraße“ tram stop (line 3).
We are going to use the rooms HS BMT and BMTEG038. Enter the building via the large staircase (or ramp), and once inside, go to the right and through the glass door.
For WiFi at the venue, you can use eduroam, or alternatively there is a guest account with credentials changing regularly, which will be provided on site.
There is a café at the ground floor of the venue as well as a canteen on the 5th floor with great views.
Accessibility: The building and the rooms we are using are all accessible for wheelchair users. There is an elevator to the canteen on the 5th floor. If you have any other concerns or questions about accessibility, please contact the organising team.
Arriving in Graz and public transport
The most environmentally friendly way to arrive in Graz is by train. There are hourly train connections from and to Vienna, for example. For timetables and tickets, see https://shop.oebbtickets.at/en/ticket
From the main train station, it is a short tram ride to the city centre.
From the airport, you can reach the city by commuter train (S5), with a connection of bus (630) and tram (line 5), or by taxi.
Graz is a very walkable city, but there are also buses and trams to get around. Public transport tickets are always valid for any kind of transport (bus and tram) and in all of Graz. There are hourly, daily or weekly tickets, or special tourist passes that also include museums and attractions.
Please note that the prices mentioned might still change for 2025.
Social events
There will be a city tour of course, more details to come.
Call for participation
The conference will be in large part an unconference with a lot of room for discussions and working groups. You can suggest topics ad-hoc on site, or you can already suggest sessions in advance. We will also start the conference with a block of short presentations.
… und danke für den Fisch! Gut 60 Leute aus Österreich, der Schweiz und Deutschland kamen zum diesjährigen Treffen der deutschsprachigen Opencast Community an die Universität Bremen. Dank der ausgezeichneten und netten Organisation durch das Team vor Ort, des leckeren Caterings und des auf Austausch fokussierten Programms mit dem Schwerpunkt “LMS” vergingen die 48 Stunden wie im Fluge.
Hopefully, most of you will know by now that Opencast as a project is part of Apereo, a non-profit organization that supports and develops open source software for higher education institutions. Because that’s what heroes do. If you want to become a hero part of that community, too, think about joining Apereo as a friend. A good way to support Apereo, Opencast, and join other open source enthusiasts in the academic field.
This is an update to the 2023/2024 crowd funding campaign as presented at the 2024 summit:
The updates to the new editor have been finished, most of them in time for Opencast 16.0.
The life cycle management is doing overtime: With more time necessary to discuss and define both the features and the technological solution, development work has started only just now.
Various security issues were the third larger part of the campaign; here, the focus has shifted towards a Spring update. Community (QA) manager Greg Logan is coordinating these efforts various institutions and individuals contribute to.
Playlists have made it into both Opencast and Tobira, with the UI to manage them still pending a discussion in the Tobira project.
Thanks to all institutions involved, both for the (additional) contributions and their patience in these projects:
University of Bern
University of Vienna and the Academic Moodle Cooperation
Technical University Vienna
Osnabruck University
University of Konstanz
ELAN e. V.
ETH Zürich
If your institution is in a position to make a contribution to the next funding campaign, or if you have suggestions on what project to work on, please feel free to contact the board.
Opencast 