Affiliated Communities
The Opencast community is a collaboration of higher education institutions working together to explore, define, and document podcasting best practices and technologies.
Through the Community mailing list and Resource exchange, the community offers guidance and information to help others choose the best approach for delivering rich media online.
The Opencast Community also supports community-driven projects to solve common issues in management of academic audiovisual content. These projects include open source software developments, such as Matterhorn, research focused projects (e.g., the pedagogical case for lecture recording) or related issues (e.g., metadata group). The Opencast Community supports these projects through feedback and participation in project-related activities.
TF-Media wishes to establish a liaison with the Opencast Community in order to make their participants aware of their respective work and to coordinate and collaborate on technical and non-technical areas where the focus is similar. Examples of this are discussions on federated identities, tools, formats, codecs and licences, metadata in media management systems, as well as legal and promotion matters.
While both the Opencast and TF-Media communities have similar objectives and are open for collaboration in principle, their compositions are different. TF-Media has a European emphasis and are driven by participants from National Research and Education Networking (NREN) organisations - yet open for universities. The worldwide Opencast Community, while being open for individuals and commercial shareholders, is driven mainly by universities and academic institutions. This difference in perspectives implies different foci and therefore diversity in technical approaches, such as service provisioning issues and networking policies, as well as
The liaison document describes these differences, but also the overwhelming congruence of the relevant topics. Feel free therefore to join the Opencast projects and involve Opencast Community in discussion whenever appropriate.
The TF-Media related inforamtion is also available on the Opencast website.
Europeana is a Thematic Network funded by the European Commission under the eContentplus programme, as part of the i2010 policy. Originally known as the European digital library network - EDLnet - it is a partnership of 100 representatives of heritage and knowledge organisations and IT experts from throughout Europe. They contribute to the Work Packages that are solving the technical and usability issues.
The project is run by a core team based in the national library of the Netherlands, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek. It builds on the project management and technical expertise developed by The European Library, which is a service of the Conference of European National Librarians.
Overseeing the project is the EDL Foundation, which includes key European cultural heritage associations from the four domains. The Foundation's statutes commit members to:
- Providing access to Europe's cultural and scientific heritage though a cross-domain portal
- Co-operating in the delivery and sustainability of the joint portal
- Stimulating initiatives to bring together existing digital content
- Supporting digitisation of Europe's cultural and scientific heritage
TF-Media wishes to establish a liaison with Europeana in order to make their participants aware of their respective work and to coordinate and collaborate on technical and non-technical areas where the focus is similar. Two basic scenarios are envisioned; on the one hand, Europeana can host and/or make available some scientific content collected and maintained by NRENs, on the other hand, TF-Media participants can have access to Europeana's contents in order to enclose and/or link them within their systems primarily for educational support.
TBD...