From February 25 to 27, 2026, elan e.V. was once again represented by several team members at the Opencast Summit, which took place in Manchester this year. For some participants, the summit actually began a day earlier, on February 24, with the "Preconference Workshop for Developers", which, among other things, provided an opportunity for the community to make decisions regarding the further development of Opencast—decisions that often remain unresolved in day-to-day work.
Our team looks back on three days defined above all by productive exchange , within the community and between the various institutions that either use Opencast or contribute to its development. The unconference format also played a key role in fostering this exchange, enabling numerous workshops that generated ideas for action and helped identify shared goals.
Ed Watson from the University of Innsbruck opened his short talk with the words, “This is my loveletter to TobiraTobira, Opencast’s video portal, is one of the topics currently attracting a great deal of attention among Opencast adopters. Lukas Kalbertodt from elan e.V. contributed two presentations on Tobira: one providing an overview of the new developments since the last Opencast Summit, and another introducing CampusTube , a project that enables smaller universities to operate their own Tobira instance through a self-service portal with minimal barriers to entry. Beyond that, AI was, of course, another widely discussed topic—just as it is elsewhere, it is also generating significant discussion within the Opencast community.
In addition to the presentations, the Opencast Summit once again offered many engaging discussions, for example around workflows in Opencast and the Opencast data model. The data model defines, for instance, what constitutes an event or a series, which data are associated with them, and how they interact. In the future, the data model is set to become clearer and more precise—an important step toward further improving Opencast.
All in all, it was once again a very successful Opencast Summit, with Manchester proving to be a wonderful host. The conference, held in the “Penthouse” of Alliance Manchester Business School , as well as the shared evenings in the city’s bars, rounded off the welcoming and friendly atmosphere.
Many thanks to the organizers and the entire community – we’re already looking forward to the next Opencast Summit! 🙌
