Re: IRC mailing list bridge

On 4/23/22 4:15 PM, Christopher Allen wrote:
> I'd dream that someday that these tools become a template for other W3C 
> Community Groups (or work item groups) where they could just clone a repo, 
> change a YML acronym and details somewhere, and instantly they get a Jitsi 
> channel and transcripts,  IRC channels and support bots, etc.

We're getting closer to that day... only about 10 more years and I think we'll
be there. :P

More seriously, there has been significant work over the past 3 years to
separate the CGBot to be less tied to specific messaging technologies (it now
supports IRC, XMPP, SIP, and WebRTC, etc.). We've also tried making less and
less modifications to Jitsi, to the point that we're almost running a vanilla
Jitsi install.

> I'd dream that someday that these tools become a template for ... work
> item groups)

I'll also note that today, all the work item groups have access to screen and
audio recording, bridging to IRC, automatic transcriptions, and scribe tool
minutes publication.

We need to do more when it comes to auto-publishing minutes... we're so close
now that we have auto-transcription working. We have some ideas to improve
auto-transcription as well.

The biggest factors preventing cloning a repo and changing a YML config are
all the subsystems that we end up using for screen recording and
auto-transcription. That whole field is still pretty nascent... as funky as
the Google Speech-to-Text auto-transcription can be at times, the open source
versions of that software are abysmal... Google just has more access to
billions (literally) of hours of audio to train their algorithms on and the
open source folks don't. All of this would be easier if Zoom or any of the
proprietary platforms had more open APIs for integrating bots, but they don't
(by choice -- they had at first and then started closing down the APIs once
they became successful -- Slack used to have good IRC bridging, until they
decided that everyone should just be using Slack). Zoom never had the APIs we
needed to hook the CG Bot into their systems in the way we needed to for
screen recording, auto-transcription, and fetching of recordings/logs/etc.

Cost is, of course, another thing... running the CCG platform is pretty cost
effective given we have a community of 450+ people with upwards of 50-80
people on calls per week... but it's not free. The systems themselves cost
roughly $5K/year to run... $2K/year for the VM, $2K/year for
auto-transcription, and another $1K/year for backups, phone-based dial-in, etc.

Fairly difficult to optimize much cost out of that... a similar hosted open
source system for Jitsi is roughly $6K/year for our volume (and that doesn't
cover auto-transcription, video recording logs stored "forever", and we can't
integrate CG Bot into it AFAICT, no open APIs for retrieving logs/audio/video,
either).

I'm sure some enterprising young developer might be able to mechanize the
process in the next couple of years, but then you have the whole problem of
the browser vendors deciding to change core protocols/APIs w/o any notice to
the broader community.

So, all that to say -- it's probably possible in the future, just a matter of
some time, money, code, and some luck. :)

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny - https://www.linkedin.com/in/manusporny/
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
News: Digital Bazaar Announces New Case Studies (2021)
https://www.digitalbazaar.com/

Received on Friday, 29 April 2022 16:02:00 UTC