Category: Conferences

The Opencast Summit (March 8th – 10th, 2022) is dedicated to the use and management of educational videos with Opencast. While the focus of the event will be on Opencast, the community seeks participation from related domains and projects.

We are therefore inviting educational designers, service providers and others working with video in academic settings to share expertise and experience across the field and explore opportunities to collaborate in related projects.

Tracks

The conference committee is looking for proposals in the following tracks:

• Opencast adopters
  • Experience in using Opencast for lecture capture/video management
  • Ideas for new features in Opencast
  • Solutions to further develop Opencast
  • Integration scenarios
• Opencast developers
  • Presentations and meetings with a focus on technical details, likely to  see developers, system administrators, A/V-technicians and those interested in issues related to these domains.

Proposal types

There are different types of proposals for these tracks:

• Lightning talk: 10 minutes, including 5 minutes Q&A
• Presentation: 30 minutes, including 5-10 minutes Q&A
• Birds of a feather (BoF): 1 hour. Suggest a topic you would like to discuss with others.
• Workshop: Bring forward a topic you would like to introduce others to or discuss with others. Workshops should happen in the two weeks after the conference. Feel free to also propose a workshop topic you would like to attend.

Alternatively, feel free to suggest a workshop for a topic  you would like to know more about. Ideally, you can designate/suggest  someone to host, but feel free to make this a task for the program committee.

Deadline

Please submit an abstract of your proposed presentation and the format you would like via the provided registration form by 22 February 2022.

The Opencast Summit 2022 will take place from March 8-10, 2022. Due to the current situation, the Summit will take place online. The event will be hosted by Osnabrück University.

Sessions will start at 12pm UTC every day and end at about 4pm UTC, depending on how many sessions will be submitted.

We invite newcomers a day early to an Introduction to Opencast workshop at 12pm UTC on March 7, 2022.

Following the Summit, there will be a number of workshops to take an in-depth look at some topics of particular interest to the community. Workshops can be submitted by anyone. If you are interested in a topic but cannot host it yourself, you can also request a workshop. At the Summit a planning session will be held during which the workshop hosts shortly present what their workshop is about, and we can decide when to schedule the workshop.

There will be another post shorty with the call for proposals.

The conference schedule is live:

Opencast Summit 2022

As a result of the Opencast Summit 2020 the board started to evaluate if the current schedule and format of the Opencast Summits still fits the adopters’ needs. As part of that a survey was conducted. Based on results and on further discussions in the community schedule and format of the Opencast Summits have been adjusted.

The need schedule is:

• Opencast Summit, an international conference at the end of March, three days in person. For the community to meet and talk, sit together, work together, discuss things. Plus, there will be workshops and hackathons. As little talks as we can.
• DACH Meeting of the German-speaking community, end of August, 2 days in person. Same as the Opencast summit. Aber auf Deutsch.
• Opencast Online Summit, beginning of December, three or four half-days. Talks, talks, talks. And a few other formats that work online.

We will start with the new schedule in 2022. So the next event for the Opencast community will be the Opencast Summit in March 2022. However, based on the further development of the pandemic, it has yet to be decided if the Summit can take place in person, or will take place online again.

… are now available at https://video.ethz.ch/events/opencast/2021/osnabruck.html. Thanks to the University of Osnabruck for hosting us, Melanie Koller for editing and uploading the videos.

This year’s annual D/A/CH conference will take place online from the 27th to the 29th of September. All further information, such as links and registration, can be found on the D/A/CH Tagung 2021 page.

Registration and participation are free of charge!

If you would like to help with organization, please contact: rrolf@uni-osnabrueck.de

The Opencast Summit 2021 was the first International Opencast Summit that took place entirely online. This resulted in a huge increase in the number of participants. While previous summits were attended by about 80 participants (in person) the 2021 Summit was attended by 170 participants via web conferencing.

In order to better understand why so many participants attended the Summit and what could be improved for future meetings, a short survey was send to all Summit participants. This survey was filled out by 22 participants, 8 of these attended the Summit for the first time.

Overall the participants were satisfied with the Summit and were glad it took place at all. Accessing the talks via BigBlueButton and attending online seems to have worked well. New participants pointed out that they liked the variety and range of topics in the presentations. However, the “conference feeling” was missed by many. Being able to talk to people one on one during breaks was missed.

Of the 22 participants who filled out the survey, 14 would have been able to attend the Summit in person, if in person attendance had been possible. For 8 that would not have been the case. Of these 8, 4 attended the Summit for the first time. Some of the participants (7) furthermore stated that they would prefer to meet online for future Summits while 15 would like to meet in person if that’s possible.

For future Summits the Board thus has to consider that while many people in the community would like to attend a Summit in person, there is a considerable number of people who would like to or are only able to participant online. This poses a challenge for future Summits and raises the question of how future Summits should be organized. While this question has been not been answered, the Opencast Board is working on a concept for a way forward that addresses this challenge.

Recordings for the 2021 Opencast Summit are now available.

The program for the Opencast Summit 2021 is now available.

The call for participation for the international Opencast summit 2021, hosted virtually on April 6-9, 2021 by TU Graz, Austria is out.

If you are interested in the use and management of academic video in general and Opencast in particular, or if you interested in Opencast development, you are invited to submit a conference session until February 21.

For more information, visit the conference website at:

• ocs21.tugraz.at

The 2021 Opencast Summit will be hosted on April 6-9 2021 by TU Graz, Austria.

Obviously, it is highly unlikely we will be able to travel in April so the summit will take place online, thanks to Ypatios and his colleagues for making this possible. Based on the successful online summit of the German-speaking community in September this year we will avoid long online sessions and are planning to spread the programme across four days and possibly parallel tracks for shorter daily sessions; details will follow early in 2021.

If you are interested in supporting this event, please consider volunteering for the programme committee, which will publish the call for proposals, review papers, and schedule the programme for the summit.

With that, the board would also like to thank everyone for their contribution to the Opencast community in this extraordinary year. Enjoy the holidays and take care!