Re: Migration to Google Meet

Seriously!
Huge amount of commitment over the years, and I don't think this community
would exist without it.

No way to overstate the gratitude to Manu and team

On Sat, Mar 22, 2025, 18:17 Harrison <harrison@spokeo.com> wrote:

> 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/
>>
>>