Opencast Matterhorn 1.0 Mid-Project Update

Report submitted to the Mellon Foundation on Dec 2, 2009

Introduction

Officially launched in July 2009, the team worked in a distributed fashion for the first several iteration cycles. At the end of September 2009, the entire team came together at ETH Zurich for an intensive week focused on assessing progress, working through open questions and critical issues. This week also helped to ensure that the new members became an integral part of the team, was aware of the project practices such as decision-making and development processes and was clear on their individual role and goals. The week was highly successful, the team is very cooperative, but also engaged and willing to ask hard questions – very important in a collaborative effort. The project has successfully completed its first quarter deliverables and is working towards a preview release to share with the larger community at the end of January. The preview release will be followed with shorter iteration releases so that our Preview community will be able to keep pace with the project and inform (and perhaps contribute to the product).

Community Building and Governance

The collaboration between the universities that are part of the Opencast Matterhorn project has been productive and engaged. Working under the constraints of a single year deliverable of the scope we proposed for Matterhorn 1.0 has required a good deal of cohesion and oversight from the beginning. The project has benefited greatly from the trust relationships that were built out of the planning activities for the Opencast Community the year before. These activities also meant that there was a more accurate assessment up front in regards to the various competencies coming in from each university.

The project manager and a team of product owners manage Opencast Matterhorn development. All the meetings and decisions are made publicly on list and all meetings are open to the community to attend and are recorded for on-demand viewing. This has been an effective way of engaging the larger community and ensuring that we communicate across time-zone differences. This openness has been helpful in setting the stage for future adoption of Matterhorn and for expanding contributions beyond the core institutions.

An Executive Advisory group was formed by the Matterhorn board and acts as a group of high level consultants to the Opencast Matterhorn board. They will be called on as individuals and as representatives of their organization and/or constituency to provide feedback toward the direction of the project and Matterhorn product. This group was convened for its first meeting on November 18, 2009.

Executive Advisory Members

• Hal Abelson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Hervé Bourlard, IDIAP Research Institute
• Malcolm Brown, EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative
• Tiffiniy Cheng, Participatory Culture Foundation
• Gerald Friedland, International Computer Science Institute
• Ross Gardler, Open Source Software Watch
• Obadiah Greenberg, YouTube
• Peter Kaufman, Intelligent TV
• Sean Mehan, University of Highlands and Inlands (Sabhal Mòr Ostaig UHI)
• Mike Sandler, Epiphan
• John Shawe-Taylor, University College London
• Scott Siddal, Longsight Group

Preview Release

At the end of January, the project will have completed its second quarter. It will release a preview release (also known as 0.5) to showcase the architecture, code, and capabilities to potential adopters or anyone else who is interested in assessing the project outputs thus far. Far from complete, the feature set will cover the essential functions from recording capture through processing and Administrative interface to the delivery to an accessible media player.  The learner will be able to search videos by keywords, view videos with captions, as well as subscribe to RSS feeds. This release will go through QA including accessibility and usability testing. To learn more abut the features available in this release, visit http://preview.tinyurl.com/yaa9nup.

Adoption Strategy and Status

Based on a community survey conducted in March 2009, personalized follow-up in September, and direct inquiries from institutions, we have identified at least 20 organizations who are planning to test the 0.5 release (in addition to the 13 partner institutions).  The project recently released a survey through which we can formally collect information about the interests and goals from potential adopters and testers.  Example institutions that we are looking forward to testing the 0.5 release range from small colleges, such as Arcadia, to larger universities such as Columbia and Tel Aviv.

The adoption strategy working group has identified and begun implementing several strategies to cultivate testing and adoption and prepare to support those who do (https://wiki.opencastproject.org/confluence/display/open/Adoption+Strategy). Strategies include:

• Establish “base camps”, institutions who host helps other institutions by hosting capture agents and Matterhorn instances for testing and demonstration purposes. We have already confirmed base camp commitments from the Steeple Project (Oxford and University of Nottingham) and Universities of Saskatchewan and Vigo.
• Engage with potential commercial and non-profit partners, such as the Longsight Group and NITLE. The Longsight group will test the release and if stable enough will create a “Try Opencast” service.
• Implement Adopter/Tester Classifications, enabling institutions to self-identify their own needs relative to common adoption scenarios, and follow a testing/adoption path that best meets their needs
• Create process and allocate resources toward receiving feedback and providing support to testers and adopters

A new website design was launched in December to improve access to and discoverability of critical project information.

In addition to Universities, there is an increasing number of commercial service and product providers that are interested in integration with the Opencast Matterhorn project. These include Kaltura, Dim-Dim, Speaker-text, UV-Layer, and more. Some have indicated a willingness to consider dual licensing and to contributing staff resources toward making this happen.

Conclusion

Opencast Matterhorn is well on its way to achieving its 1.0 deliverables, and it is clear from interest across higher ed and the many potential adopters and commercial partners we have spoken with that the platform is a welcome addition to the current suite of learning and rich media applications. That said, it is also clear that Matterhorn 1.0 is the first step in this regard. There are additional critical features that will enable larger installations and deeper learning tools that are necessary to have the kind of qualitative impact on teaching, learning, and the academic enterprise that we think is possible. We anticipate that RIT and the Mellon board will be as pleased as the Opencast community with the outcomes thus far.