Opencast Board Elections 2025
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 on the Opencast Blog or on Opencast Announcements before the start of the 2025 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.