[BLU/Officers] Jitsi zoom et al Re: Online for August meeting.

[Bill Ricker]

On Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 07:34 Jerry Feldman <gaf.linux at gmail.com> wrote:

> Conferencing software used for teaching is quite different from the jitsi
> and zoom models.
>

Well, teaching platforms should be different from Zoom ...
 but way too many folks using Zoom BradyBunch highly symmetric N:N
meeting/conference for every usecase including education even when its a
poor fit. Good for seminar classes where the students present in rotation
and 'good' for the TA to snoop to see who's napping / game playing during
lecture. Very wrong for large frosh 101's!

Asymmetric models are better for most use cases aside from small team
meetings, both for UI/UX and bandwidth.
 There are both strong and weak asymmetric models and hierarchical or
tiered vs 'democratic' models.

 Free Zoom, Free Jitsi are as democratic as IRC, first person in is
moderator, and if they leave, its up for grabs. Anyone can with moderator
consent at least speak, unlink face video, and screen share. (Except maybe
not Android app, as sceenshare is against security there?)

StreamYard is strictly asymmetric and tiered:  host and panelists on camera
and mic, consumers are on syndicated CDN streams with managed/merged text
chat upstream only, host can select Brady bunch, auto focus, or manual
focus, host can cherry pick comments into lower third,  host can set guest
lower third.

Standard webinar products are very asymmetric, but have a # code to record
a question for the Operator to queue a voice question to the presenter.

Zoom also has webinar 1:N model as separate product, probably only in paid
accounts. I understand one of the fall SF eConventions wil l be using that
instead of classic Zoom for much of their programming, which makes sense -
they don't scare people by saying we're switching from the Zoom you knkow
but they still get to use something more efficient.

(For many reasons I will barely consider touching either Zoom product with
a 10 foot double insulated fiberglass pole. )

I got some feedback on JITSI use at virtual SF WorldCon Exhibits
department. If we were to set up a private jitsi server in the colo or
cloud, we could set default camera = off, which greatly increased the
number of simultaneous viewer connections.  And we would also have some
preauthorized control users. (One open item -  we'd need further research
on how to shut down rooms after a meeting is over to prevent trolls taking
over.)
(Jitsi support boards suggest that mandating BradyBunch mode also saves
bandwidth. One can hope that now that FF78 is released the simulcast
efficiencyis available to all..)

I looked at the Financials of running private jitsi in cloud ☁️-  a $40/mo
CPU optimized DO droplet would run a 3hour meeting per week without
exceeding monthly net charges for the size groups BLU, BostonPM get. I'm
not advocating that, but I may do that temporarily to learn node
management. A cloud provider with hibernate discount might be cheaper for a
single group!
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.blu.org/pipermail/officers/attachments/20200817/3ea9da72/attachment.html>