Category: Uncategorized

Because of you –our amazing participants– and the ever-supportive Opencast Board, the Opencast Summit 2025 at TU Graz was a success. Thanks to everyone who showed up and jumped into talks about everything Opencast, but especially about the current trends in AI, as well as modernising Opencast with the exciting funding chance the Community recently received. Your ideas and energy made it all come together.

It’s all of us who made this event so inspiring. Thank you for being there!

---

summit sessions

Tuesday (pre-summit Developer workshop)

Morning Session: Brainstorming	Notes
Afternoon Session	Notes

Wednesday

Welcome by the hosts and the Opencast Board	Recording
Stand-up from the participants	Recording
Opencast in Numbers	Recording
Opencast 17.x	Recording
Opencast Spring Update	Recording
Migrating from Google Transcription to Whisper: Better Subtitles for Less	Recording
Vendor Presentations: Epiphan	Recording
Vendor Presentations: Extron	Recording
Upgrading Manchester from a Very Old Opencast	Recording
Rethinking Recording (- state of the art & ideas for the future)	Recording
Enhancing Opencast content with AI (Whisper + LLM)	Recording
Beyond captions: How AI turns Lecture Videos into Smart Study Guides	Recording
Advances in Paella Player + IA	Recording
Can local LLM co-pilots help with day-to-day OC devops?	Recording

Thursday

First look at Opencast Explore	Recording
Towards a roadmap meeting incorporating the crowd funding campaign	Recording / Notes
Opencast Modernisation	Notes
Metadata + AI	Notes
Monitoring & System Requirements	Notes
Captions & Transcripts	Recording
Introduction to Opencast	Notes
Tobira Roadmap	Recording

Friday

Opencast & Moodle	Recording
AI++	Notes
Editor Improvements	Notes
Can We Remove This?	Notes
Vendors++	Recording
Crash course: OC Compiling/Testing/Reviewing	Recording
JWT	Recording
Publish metadata directly without manually starting the “republish metadata” workflow	Recording
Public Board Meeting	Recording

---

Recording Delivery Time

We’re pretty proud of how fast we got the recordings out the door. Here are the numbers: for every 10 minutes of recorded material, it took us about 7 minutes to process and publish… Yep, that’s 0,7 times the session length! Quick turnarounds mean everyone can revisit the great discussions sooner. So, to the next hosts at the University of Manchester: think you can beat our time? We’re throwing down the gauntlet. Bring your A-game and let’s see what you’ve got!
All jokes(?) aside, we’re really looking forward to heading your way next year. You’re going to be awesome hosts!

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.

It is finally time to do the move from Google Groups to GitHub
Discussions. The groups users@opencast.org and dev@opencast.org have been archives and are only accessible read-only from now on. For any further discussions or questions, please go to:

• github.com/orgs/opencast/discussions

Not all groups have been migrated. Some sub-communities like anwender@ or lms@ still exist on Google Groups for now. We can migrate additional groups if those communities want that.

If there are any problems, ping us on Matrix.

Matrix room (Chat)

Not a replacement, but an additional place for quick questions or just to chat is our Matrix community. Join the Matrix space #opencastproject:matrix.org and in particular, the community channel #opencast-community:matrix.org.

Also, the room #opencast-announcements:matrix.org will from now on get a copy of messages posted here and sent to the announcements list.

See you on GitHub!

Please be aware that because of the virtual summit happening next week, there will not be a SysAdmin meeting next Wednesday.

Since end of December isn’t a great time for a meeting either, but we didn’t want to skip two meetings in a row – especially with Opencast 17 on the horizon – the next and last SysAdmin meeting of this year is scheduled for the 11th of December at 3pm CET.

As usual, this meeting is primarily aimed at folks administrating an Opencast instance, but developers and people interested in Opencast are welcome to join. Because the release of OC 17 is happening a week prior, this will be a main topic.

All information in regards to the BBB room and a link to the agenda can be found in our calendar. Feel free to add topics you want to talk about!

… 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.

Im nächsten Jahr treffen wir uns dann in Jena.

Universidad de Alicante has joined the Opencast funding scheme as our ninth supporting institution. Thanks Kiko for making this possible!

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.