Re: Migration to Google Meet

On 2025-03-09 17:53, Manu Sporny 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
> 


I'm not a regular on the calls, but I really appreciate CG's approach 
and its commitment to using solutions that align with its goals.

I don't fully understand the technical or social reasons for switching 
to closed systems with questionable practices when the open solution has 
worked so well for so long. Is something broken? What's the fix? Or what 
specific conveniences make the trade-off worthwhile? If there's 
documentation on this, I'd love to check it out. These lessons could 
benefit the wider W3C community. Jitsi has served other groups well in 
advancing open standards.

Also, will there be any steps to ensure that participants are aware of 
how their information (text, voice, etc.) is processed in the new setup?

And, thanks to Manu and everyone who has put so much time and care into 
this over the years. Many of us have benefited from this work. In this 
context, it's about as close as it gets to eating our own dog food and 
staying true to the spirit of open initiatives.

-Sarven
https://csarven.ca/#i