Re: Migration to Google Meet (was: Re: [Agenda] W3C CCG 2025-03-11 - Q1 2024 Review and Work Item Updates)

Thanks, Manu, for your help!  The co-chairs plan to bring up this topic
during this coming Tuesday's CCG meeting, but we also plan to leave the
discussion open for a month or two before making the final call.  We
actually want to introduce some additional meeting formats and ideas, such
as break-out discussions and education series once a quarter, so it would
be good to clarify our high-level needs with the community before deciding
on an appropriate tool.

Sincerely,

*Harrison Tang*
CEO
 LinkedIn  <https://www.linkedin.com/company/spokeo/> •   Instagram
<https://www.instagram.com/spokeo/> •   Youtube <https://bit.ly/2oh8YPv>


On Sun, Mar 9, 2025 at 9:55 AM Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>
wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 5, 2025 at 9:03 PM Harrison <harrison@spokeo.com> wrote:
> > The co-chairs will also propose some new meeting formats to help drive
> our community engagement and grow our audience.
>
> I noted during the last call that the Chairs intend to suggest a move
> to Zoom or Google Meet from our open source Jitsi meeting solution
> that we use today. We've contemplated this move multiple times over
> the last 11 years, mostly because Jitsi has proven to be unstable to
> some (though, has also captured almost every single meeting we've had
> over the past 11 years, with a log, with a bridge to IRC, with
> advanced queueing support, with web-page generation and links to key
> topics/decisions, etc.).
>
> The culture of people using the Web has shifted over the last decade
> or two, away from using systems that we control to using centralized
> solutions in exchange for convenience. Ideally, we don't have to
> exchange convenience for control, but that's what we're doing by using
> Zoom or Google Meet (or any other rented communication platform,
> really). I'm usually one of the people that argues strongly in the
> direction of running systems that we control, even if it's less
> convenient, or it costs more... but the people willing to maintain and
> improve those systems have been few and far between.
>
> Here we are again, contemplating the use of closed systems to create
> open standards... and I'm exhausted by the debate and I'm exhausted by
> maintaining our current system as well.
>
> So, rather than push back this time, I spent yesterday trying to save
> the one thing we really need: A record of our meetings so that we can
> push back against trolls that might try to inject submarine patents or
> bully us behind unrecorded meetings. This happened repeatedly before
> we recorded meetings, and the recordings largely fixed those issues
> which many of the  more recent participants had the benefit of not
> experiencing.
>
> The following tool will allow us to schedule meetings using Google
> Meet, and keep recordings and transcriptions (and backups) on our own
> infrastructure (like we do today):
>
> https://github.com/w3c-ccg/cg-archiver/
>
> We lose the generation of linkable web pages for our meetings, email
> archival of meetings, marking topics and subtopics in our minutes,
> linking to specific lines in our minutes, control/debug of the bot via
> IRC, having fine grained control over the minutes we generate, etc.
> What we gain is convenience of not having to maintain the meeting
> infrastructure by having Google do it for us. I'm fairly certain we
> can get back to feature parity in time, if people volunteer to add the
> features back, which I doubt will happen given the last decade's track
> record.
>
> In any case, we have a path forward and we should take it so that we
> can stop having this endless debate and get on to the more meaningful
> creation of open standards to re-decentralize the Web and Internet.
>
> -- manu
>
> --
> Manu Sporny - https://www.linkedin.com/in/manusporny/
> Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
> https://www.digitalbazaar.com/
>
>