Hi,
Just want to say thanks for the meeting last night. Even though it for long periods was like eavesdropping on people in the next room using a glass, it was an interesting experiment to participate in. Its also something I would like to be able to do more, especially if the audio issues can be sorted.
I also believe this is a concept that could be used much more within the Drupal community, helping to connect users over great distances. It would be extremely useful for someone like me who live in a place where there really isn't many serious Drupal users to be found.
The one problem as I see it is that WebEx cost money, requiring that it is hosted by someone who has a subscription.
There is an open source alternative named BigBlueButton (http://bigbluebutton.org) that has similar functionality. However, that in turn would require someone to host the server and provide the bandwidth it will use.
Then there are also a bunch of peer(s)-2-peer(s) solutions that can be used for smaller groups.
So, what I was thinking is that maybe we could look into this, test a few options and then create a section here on d.o with best practise guides and options for how to organise both larger conferences and smaller virtual group sessions.
If any of you are interested in this, I will create a new group here on g.d.o where we further can discuss and organise this. I did a quick search, but couldn't find any group that covers this topic.
/thomas
Comments
audio
Thanks, Thomas -- I'm actually willing to donate my firm's WebEx account so long as I'm involved with the group. In the course of evaluating various proprietary and FOSS solutions to this problem, WebEx has turned out to be one of the best. But I'm all for independent evaluation of the whole matrix (platform compatibility, featureset, max users, etc). Anybody feel like taking that up??
Our difficulties with audio that night had two vectors independent of the platform, though: (1) really, really bad wifi and (2) poor acoustics. I'm looking to resolve both of those in our next meeting. The latter has posed the biggest issue, and I'm going to bring more equipment to make it a little less "garbage in" for remote participants. Wireless has to do with location, which is always open to recommendation & discussion. We could really use a "home" for these meetings, but that's been lacking thus far.
tried bigbluebutton
So I tried bigbluebutton over the weekend -- it appears you have to upload a presentation in order to share it. Am I the only one who sees that as limiting? I mean, the commercial services allow you to share your screen. I guess 1:1 skype share could work, and use UStream to broadcast, but you'd also need some kind of phone in service (freeconferencecall.com?) to enable audio conference. It could definitely work, though.