OpenCast-Enterprise Podcasting Management

Open Cast Project (Pending funding, Start Date: April 2008)
URL: http://confluence.media.berkeley.edu/confluence/display/WCTREQ/OpenCast+Community-+Home

Project Goals:

Open Cast is a project which proposes to marry the values and mission of community source software development and the open educational resource (OER) movement by

• Lowering the cost of creating and hosting a scalable and robust online media infrastructure to open the doors to the world of rich humanities curriculum to be accessed and shared by learners and educators around the world.
• Establishing a community source effort and community of practice around the development of an open source video and audio platform to capture, disseminate, and manage openly available rich media content.
• Producing a roadmap and set of specifications for funding, developing, and sustaining a CSS webcast application for higher education; and
• Determining community readiness to undertake such a project.

Leading Institutions: 

University of California, Berkeley

• Lead: Mara Hancock, mara@media.berkeley.edu
• Project Manager: Adam Hochman, adam@media.berkeley.edu
• Program Manager: Ben Hubbard, ben@media.berkeley.edu

Participating Organizations (in progress, partial list):

Stanford University

Yale University

Cambridge University

ETH Zurich

Participatory Culture Foundation

MIT/Spoken Language

University of Catalonia

Indiana University

Australian National University

University of Virginia Medical School

Project Highlights:

This project is proposed for Funding beginning in March 2008. Prior to this, a two day requirements meeting was held in October 2007 with nine organizations in attendance.

The outcomes of this meeting are on the Open Cast Wiki: http://confluence.media.berkeley.edu/confluence/display/WCTREQ/OpenCast+Community-+Home

Upcoming Milestones and Deliverables:

• Requirements meeting (North America/June)
• Requirements and specifications (Europe/July)
• Roadmap and Specifications Meeting (Berkeley/September)
• Proposal (December)

Community:

This is still a fledgling community of practice. There is a rapidly growing number of institutions engaged, and there are 288 subscribers to the opencast listserv currently.

We have many interested institutions and the planning grant period will enable the partners to express solid commitment and alignment of efforts. We have been in contact with over 43 potential partners.

Sustainability:

As a community source project this effort will build on the existing community source infrastructures and governance as much as possible. The OpenCast community will join together to develop a plan for sustained resource management and product governance and maintenance.

Marketing/Evangelism:

The Open Cast project will hold three requirements meetings over the course of the upcoming 8 months. UC Berkeley has been presenting at Higher Ed IT, OER, and Community Source conferences. There is a project wiki.

Synergy with other projects: 

The Fluid Project

Fluid Project work will be leveraged for development and design methodologies and presentation layer technologies. We will utilize existing components and contribute new components and design patterns back to the project. The work being done in Fluid around content management will be especially useful.

Sakai Project

The Sakai technology stack is being utilized in Open Cast and will be leveraged for a variety of APIs (Content Management is in use now). It is loosely coupled with Sakai, so the interface and content can be seamlessly exposed to faculty and students within their collaboration and learning environment. Currently we are using Sakai infrastructure to share code with our colleagues.

Moodle Project

We will want to expose Open Cast within Moodle similarly to how it is exposed within Sakai. We will be looking for Moodle campuses to partner with us in a build project.

Kuali Student

Open Cast will be a consumer of Kuali Student web services.

OpenCollections Project

We would like to look toward OpenCollections as a potential media collections management tool for preservation of and access to the rich media produced via the OpenCast system.

Participatory Culture Foundation/MIRO

PCF is the developer of  the open source desktop video player, Miro. The are committed to enabling universities to customize and brand customized players. They are also interested in leading the development of an open web-based portal and player that enables community, learning, and social computing activities around video content.

ETH Zurich Multimedia Services/Replay

ETH Zurich Multimedia Services is working on a product called Replay, which will create an open source media processing engine. They are working with a number of other schools and coordinating organizations in Europe such as SWITCH, SURF, CARET, University of Jena, University of Triest, University of Osnabruek, and University of Tuebingen. We anticipate using Replay to act as the Open Cast media processing engine.