Re: CHANGE OF VENUE: Meeting tomorrow

Hi all,

The Jitsi server we were going to use is hosted by me. I have reliably 
held calls with approx. 30 callers but no more than that, and even then 
there were scattered issues despite my attempts at fine-tuning. Same 
goes for BigBlueButton, where we've done 50ish people but almost all of 
those were text participants. If we really do end up with a high number 
of participants, we need another strategy.

In both the case of Jitsi and BBB, It's wise to not have everyone 
sharing audio and video when they are not directly participating. BBB 
takes this approach by default, but still has performance issues (even 
on beefy hardware) in my experience with lots of participants.

Next time around, I would propose the use of a Jitsi room for the 
speakers and live streaming via OBS to other platforms, which I can 
facilitate. Then people can join via text chat format and optionally be 
pulled into the Jitsi room as a queue builds for questions / 
participants. We'd have to figure out the best place to stream and how 
to handle the text chat and queue.

This would mean:  videoconferencing for active participation + streaming 
for passive viewing + text chat for wider audience. It's only necessary, 
of course, if there really are a lot of people who want to join, and it 
also requires an agenda with at least the starting speaker(s).

Cheers,
- Sean

Sean O'Brien
Visiting Lecturer, Cybersecurity, Yale Law School
Fellow, Information Society Project (ISP) at Yale Law School
Founder, Privacy Lab at Yale ISP,https://privacylab.yale.edu

On 3/29/23 08:22, Bob Wyman wrote:
> Johannes,
> I support the use of Zoom for this meeting even though I have a strong 
> preference for the use of free and open source software (FOSS) 
> whenever doing so is reasonable. As has been often noted, Jitsi is 
> well known to experience issues when used by large numbers of people. 
> It is my hope that either Jitsi's issues will be resolved or that some 
> alternative will be developed that doesn't have such issues. In the 
> meantime, it is appropriate to use whichever tool provides the best 
> support for our purposes. Given that we are hoping for a large 
> attendance at this meeting, the use of Zoom is appropriate.
>
> If there are alternatives to Zoom and Jitsi, it would be useful to 
> explore their use for future meetings.
>
> It is important to remember that the protocols developed in this group 
> are to be used by both non-commercial and commercial systems. While we 
> should ensure that nothing in our work creates a preference or 
> advantage for any specific system, commercial or not, we should be 
> open to and welcome the participation of those employed by commercial 
> organizations just as we would that of anyone else. Anyone willing to 
> make the intellectual property rights disclosures and assurances 
> required by the W3C and who is also willing to contribute to the open 
> development of open protocols should be welcomed. If this group 
> appears hostile to commercial participation, the probable result is 
> that our work will be less well informed, less well done, and less 
> well accepted than it might otherwise be. That would be unfortunate.
>
> bob wyman