[BLU/Officers] Online meetings

[John Abreau]

I've added Federico to the conversation.

I did some further testing, and found that desktop sharing and windows
sharing seem to work well on both hangouts-meet meet and jitsi.

I looked into recording the meetings, and I found that jitsi does it out of
the box for free, whereas hangouts only provides it for Enterprise
accounts, which I assume would be prohibitively expensive for us. Jitsi
records the meetings to dropbox, and when I downloaded and played my test
recording afterwards, the video and audio quality were excellent.

I performed both tests from within google chrome, so both are
platform-agnostic. Members won't have to install a dedicated client to
attend. Unless they attend by a handheld device, of course, but I saw that
jitsi has both iOS and Android client apps, and I assume hangout-meet does
as well. I tested the jitsi android app, before I tried it in the browser,
and it worked well.

If we find that all else is equal, I'm leaning toward jitsi at this point,
but I'd still like to run some tests with other participants using both
platforms, initially with just a few of us and later with a larger number
of participants.

Setting up our own jitsi server is an option I'd like to investigate later,
but for now we can stick with the existing free server. The roll-your-own
server is only actively supported on Ubuntu, and apparently installing it
on CentOS is a major hassle, so if we decide to set up our own, I'll want
to build the new server with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS instead of CentOS 8, and
20.04 won't be released until next month.


On Tue, Mar 24, 2020 at 3:20 PM John Abreau <abreauj at gmail.com> wrote:

> I also have a server at home that's meant for our site. I had held off on
> building it until CentOS 8 was released, then forgot to get back to it, but
> I'll add that to my todo list and start working on it this week.
>
> I installed jitsi earlier today, just after replying to Bill. It looks
> okay in the browser and on my android phone, as far as I can tell without
> other participants, although in firefox it complained about the browser and
> recommended google chrome instead. The jitsi client application appears to
> be a text-based chat client; I've been unable to find any video
> capabilities in it.
>
> I lust connected to Hangout Meet with google chrome using my gapps login.
> Again, like jitsi, I need some other participants in order to try it out
> properly.
>
> The video meeting I have open now is at the following link:
>
> https://meet.google.com/oda-sngs-krp
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 24, 2020 at 3:01 PM Jerry Feldman <gaf.linux at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I agree that G-Hangout-Meet and Jtsi are worth a look. We have 2 issues:
>> 1. April 15th. We just have to coordinate with Federico.
>> 2. Officers. (a more standard collaboration platform, like G-Hangout-Meet
>> 3. I have a server sitting at home that I will bring to the BLU hosting
>> center at some time.
>>
>> On Tue, Mar 24, 2020 at 2:50 PM Bill Ricker <bill.n1vux at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Tue, Mar 24, 2020 at 2:24 PM John Abreau <abreauj at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> If Zoom is unacceptable, then I imagine skype, hangouts, and the other
>>>> options mentioned previously will likely also have issues. It sounds like
>>>> you think it would be bad to even test Zoom.
>>>>
>>>
>>> While Skype and Hangout-Meet are owned by MS and Alpha/GOOG,
>>> respectively somewhat and highly suspect on privacy grounds, i am not
>>> *aware* of any *specific* privacy issues with them.
>>> (I haven't noticed targeted ads as a result of keywords in Hangout...
>>> yet ... as i do with G-mail, G-chat and FB DM and post/reply.
>>> Creepy but better than all the ED cures they used to offer when my only
>>> known demographic was Male.
>>> OTOH you'd think they'd know i eventually bought a mattress after
>>> comparison shopping so maybe i don't need another immediately and they can
>>> back off that keyword?)
>>>
>>> I looked through those links, and a couple of them recommend Jitsi as an
>>>> alternative. Apparently we could run our own blu.org jitsi server on
>>>> our hardware.
>>>>
>>>
>>> That would seem to be the most FLOSS-dogfood option based on the current
>>> buzz.
>>> I can't personally recommend as I haven't tried Jitsi.
>>> Offhand IDK running our own might be required - is there a free server
>>> and is it over-subscribed in this crisis?
>>>
>>> Shall we test jjitsi instead, or do you have some other platform in mind
>>>> that we should try? I'd really like to try out something suitable this week
>>>> for holding an officers meeting with at least 3 participants.
>>>>
>>>
>>> I'm comfortable with G-Hangout-*Meet* and that is compatible with our
>>> existing YouTub archive, bonus.
>>> Jitsi probably worth a look.
>>>
>>> // Bill
>>>
>>>
>>
>> --
>> --
>> Jerry Feldman <gaf.linux at gmail.com>
>> Boston Linux and Unix
>> PGP key id: 6F6BB6E7
>> Key fingerprint: 0EDC 2FF5 53A6 8EED 84D1  3050 5715 B88D 6F6B B6E7
>>
>
>
> --
> John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
> Email: abreauj at gmail.com / WWW http://www.abreau.net / PGP-Key-ID
> 0x920063C6
> PGP-Key-Fingerprint A5AD 6BE1 FEFE 8E4F 5C23  C2D0 E885 E17C 9200 63C6
>
>

-- 
John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
Email: abreauj at gmail.com / WWW http://www.abreau.net / PGP-Key-ID 0x920063C6
PGP-Key-Fingerprint A5AD 6BE1 FEFE 8E4F 5C23  C2D0 E885 E17C 9200 63C6
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