Re: CHANGE OF VENUE: Meeting tomorrow

I share the concern with the use of unaccountable black box platforms.

But it’s not the only concern. Others are:
* a concern we might not actually successfully meet due to numbers and load (unknowable, as it’s an open meeting)
* a concern that some people cannot figure out how to get Jitsi to work (beats me, but happened on a recent unrelated Jitsi call I was hosting)
* a concern that we do not move at the speed that’s required to seize the opportunity for federated social networking created right now by a certain guy

These all, and perhaps more, will needed to be traded off against each other. Different people will, naturally, prefer different tradeoffs.

For this call, we’ll err on the side of Zoom. In the future, should there be future meetings, we can make different tradeoffs, and I think think we all welcome any volunteers who help with making available communications infrastructure that is “optimal” given the various concerns and constraints.

See you soon as FediForum if you are attending, or on this call. Here is dial-in info if you prefer:

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Best,



Johannes;.



> On Mar 29, 2023, at 05:47, Sean O'Brien <sean.obrien@yale.edu> wrote:
> 
> 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 <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