Matterhorn Base Camps

As described in the Matterhorn 0.5 Release article, base camps are not only a central component for testing Matterhorn prereleases, but the nucleus of the Matterhorn community. We are therefore delighted to see four base camps in the UK, Spain, Israel and Canada.

UK Base Camp, Steeple Projects

The Steeple-BR Project is an Opencast affiliated UK based JISC funded project (running until 31st August 2010), a core aspiration of which is to conserve resources by not duplicating effort. Currently, each institution is pursuing their own technical developments, often at significant cost in both technical and financial resources. The Steeple and Steeple-BR projects seek to build a UK community to share tools, and to develop these jointly where they are needed. The hosting of an Opencast Matterhorn base camp by the Steeple-BR Project community fulfills part of this aim. More information about the Steeple projects may be found on the project wiki at: http://www.steeple.org.uk and the project blog at: http://steeple.posterous.com. For updates, join the project mailing list at:https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/STEEPLE

Loughborough University will host the UK Opencast Matterhorn base camp, providing a number of virtual machines for demonstration purposes, as well as an opportunity for other UK institutions to try out the reference capture hardware which will be available for free loan to participating institutions. Lecture capture is now accepted as a part of the E-Learning toolset available to staff and students at Loughborough University. Loughborough are currently undertaking a small scale pilot of the Echo360 lecture capture system, which has already proved very popular with the staff and students who have used it. After a deliberately slow start, there is now growing interest in lecture capture. Hosting the UK Opencast Matterhorn base camp is an ideal opportunity to compare and contrast these two systems. Loughborough also hopes to be able to pilot another installation of Opencast Matterhorn for its own staff and students.

Spain Base Camp, University of Vigo

The University of Vigo will host an Opencast-Matterhorn demonstration Base Camp. "Ready to try" hosted installations of Matterhorn Core and Matterhorn Capture devices will be available online from  0.5 to 1.0 releases. This base camp will try to be the reference base camp for Spanish speaking Matterhorn community but, of course, any international Institution (or individual) will be welcome to try the "Matterhorn experience" with us. Transition from "hosted experience" to "on campus installation" will be also supported. University of Vigo network is part of RedIRIS the Spanish high bandwidth research network, so no bandwidth issues are expected.  

Contact and support will be available in English and Spanish. Our timezone is CET; contact Vicente Goyanes, vgoya@uvigo.es)

Israel Base Camp, Tel Aviv University

Our base camp will provide dedicated virtual machines and high bandwidth access connectivity to all near by institutions who would like to try and gain some experience using Matterhon 0.5 and later releases. Please contact Jack Barokas at JackB@tauex.tau.ac.il.

Canada Base Camp, Saskatchewan

The University of Saskatchewan is hosting a Canada-wide base camp to demonstrate Matterhorn features from capture agent through processing to delivery for the 0.5 through to 1.0 releases.  Dedicated virtual machines for processing and delivery are available upon request (contact Christopher Brooks, chris.brooks@usask.ca), and open-web demo accounts will be made available. Hosted in a high bandwidth facility on the CANARIE research network, the University of Saskatchewan team will investigate the feasibility of running Matterhorn in a cloud service-based environment.

International institutions who are interested in being involved are welcome.