Re: Migration to Google Meet

On Thu, Mar 20, 2025 at 7:11 AM Will Abramson <will@legreq.com> wrote:
> migration from Jitsi.

Much of this email contains details that are probably only of interest
to the Chairs and the people running the CCG infrastructure (and
onlookers interested in technical carnage).

All that to say, feel free to ignore this email... it's largely sausage making.

> Manu stated a strong preference for Google Meet as he has managed to extract the recordings and minutes from Google Meet meetings into a server we control - something not possible with zoom.

To be a bit more accurate, we can do some of this with Zoom (but not
all of it), and even then, we'd also need Google accounts for some of
it (YouTube uploading, AI summaries of the type we're doing, emailing,
etc.), and that's in addition to our Azure accounts for hosting the VM
(which is stupid expensive now for what we're getting due to cloud fee
creep).

At present, our stuff is splattered across multiple cloud vendors and
it has resulted in a mess of expensive and difficult to administer
accounts. If we're getting locked in, we might as well get locked into
a single provider, and Google would be the easiest/cheapest one to get
locked into at this moment in time because they provide all of the
services we need to run the meetings, have breakout rooms, APIs to get
access to the things we need to archive, etc.

> An alternative could be Zoom, with manual IRC scribing. This has some positives, e.g. live transcription of the call and human discretion about what is scribed. However, the overhead is we would have to find scribes each call and people would need to learn how to use IRC.

-1, only because that's where we were in the CCG originally and we
introduced auto-scribing because we were having such a hard time
finding scribes in a timely fashion/regularly AND we started having
some pretty bad quality issues with some of the scribes.

While the current transcriptions are too/overly verbose, and they get
some acronyms and technical details wrong, on the whole they're better
than what most humans produce when it comes to documenting what
happened, and recording bad behavior, patent injection attempts, and
the like.

> So unless anyone feels strongly that Zoom is a better approach and is willing to put the effort in to make it work, my personal opinion is we start migrating to a Google Meet infrastructure.

+1 to Google infra, since the hard part is mostly done already. :)

> 1. Setup a CCG enterprise google account

Yes, and here's where things get difficult. It looks like our CCG
Google Account is on some ancient plan. I tried to upgrade it by
paying Google lots of money, and that kinda-sorta worked, but now I
can't log in as an admin to that accout; it's in some sort of zombie
state that won't allow us to log in as an administrator. We might need
to invoke human technical support at this point and that is a painful
process based on previous experiences over the years.

If we are migrating for sure (and I haven't heard any objections to
NOT migrate), we can try to do this in earnest now and know we're not
wasting our time on tech support lines trying to figure out why it's
not letting us set up an administrator for our enterprise domain.

> 2. Configure the system to export the transcriptions and recordings

Yes, we will have to re-create every regular meeting we have and
configure it. Once the Enterprise account is setup, that should be
fairly easy to do.

> 3. Update the calendar items

Yep.

> Let me know if I have missed anything.

In order to make this even more sustainable, I'm going to try to move
everything over to Github Actions as well, so if something goes wrong,
anyone in the community can see what went wrong and try to help.
Instead of trying to get all of the feature set that W3C had for its
first 20 years or so (with Zakim, RRSAgent, IRC), this time we're
optimizing for a minimum feature set that most any Javascript
developer with some experience w/ Google APIs and Github Actions could
work on. Maybe that will enable more people to participate in the
maintenance team for the CCG.

Lehn and I will make another pass at getting our Enterprise Google
Account configured with access for the Chairs and maintainers this
weekend or next. Once that's done, it should be a fairly simple switch
by issuing new Google Meet meeting URLs.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny - https://www.linkedin.com/in/manusporny/
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
https://www.digitalbazaar.com/

Received on Friday, 21 March 2025 22:19:58 UTC