Re: Improving dial-in experience

On 10/21/2017 07:25 PM, Christopher Allan Webber wrote:
> You won't have a way for people to dial in via traditional phone 
> lines though.

This is why just about every other VoIP only solution has failed at
scale at W3C. I think it may have succeeded in the Social Web WG because
the group consists of a fairly small number of technical people
contributing that are okay with installing new software whose only
purpose is connecting to the Social WG call (granted, one could make the
same argument for SIP clients).

When you're trying to build an inclusive community, you don't want to
set the barriers to entry too high... and VoIP-only, especially when
it's home grown (even though it's open source), is a barrier.

> I'd be willing to test-host a single CCG call if it would help for 
> giving a trial run.  But I know you all have put a lot of effort into
> your Asterisk setup so I totally get if you'd prefer not to!

I don't think it's about how much effort we've put into the Asterisk
setup (which is a non-trivial amount of work over the years), but more
around maximizing the number of ways someone can connect with the group.

At present we have:

* Skype / Hangouts
* SIP clients
* Plain 'ol telephone dial-in

Also note that we have other requirements for transparency purposes,
such as full audio recordings of calls and a minutes publishing system
that supports all of this.

We still have around 5-8 people per call that use dial-in, sometimes
they're dialing in because they're at the airport and can't depend on
their data connection. So, we can't really get rid of that option w/o
also making it impossible for those folks to participate (which is the
whole point of the calls). :)

In any case, food for thought. +1 to getting more people connecting more
easily to the calls. Some of the requirements are:

* Plain 'ol telephone dial-in
* Call recording and publishing for scribe cleanup purposes
* One or more easy, cross-platform, VoIP solutions

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Rebalancing How the Web is Built
http://manu.sporny.org/2016/rebalancing/

Received on Sunday, 22 October 2017 14:37:58 UTC