Re: Migration to Google Meet

Hi Manu,

While I am stating the obvious, I just want to publicly thank you and your
team for your continued support (e.g. money, time, and effort).

Sincerely,

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


On Fri, Mar 21, 2025 at 3:21 PM Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>
wrote:

> 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/
>
>