Re: Various updates, prep notes for speakers

[Corwin Brust]

Hi Bandi & Team EmacsConf!

31.5 days and counting.  Wheeee!

On Sun, Oct 25, 2020 at 11:26 PM Amin Bandali <bandali@gnu.org> wrote:

> In the notes I mention that we are evaluating BigBlueButton, Jitsi Meet,
> and GNU Jami.  However, we are currently leaning towards BigBlueButton
> for the video calls with speakers for this year.  Much like last year,

Although the training session from Sacha is my only exposure I'm
liking BBB so far.

> In other news, I set up a Mumble server for us at mumble.emacsconf.org.
> See https://mumble.emacsconf.org for instructions on how to connect to
> it.  I like to suggest that we use it at least for quick communications
> between ourselves during the event, since speaking/talking is arguably
> easier than typing.

I'm well set for handling multiple audio streams; this is fine for me.

> I think we should discuss the following:
>
> 1. We should ask our speakers to consider providing us with an
>    alternative way of reaching them (e.g. via phone) during the event,
>    in case of an urgent matter during or just before their presentation,
>    in case we can't get a hold of them via IRC or the main video call
>    during their talk due to some technical issue or oversight.

+1  - Do we need another person?  Perhaps dedicated to helping with
organizational comms?  I have someone in mind I could attempt to
recruit.

>    We can store these additional information in a temporary private git
>    repository.  Corwin, Davids, Karl, and Leo, please send me your SSH
>    pubkey off-list so I could give you access to the private repository.

Sent off-list.

On Mon, Oct 26, 2020 at 7:13 AM Sacha Chua <sacha@sachachua.com> wrote:
>
> Hello, all!
>
> On Mon., Oct. 26, 2020, 00:26 Amin Bandali, <bandali@gnu.org> wrote:
>
>>    We can do something similar for this year too, but we figured since
>>    we will likely be using BigBlueButton, we could try asking the
>>    audience members who have a question to directly join the BBB room
>>    for the current talk and interact with the speaker there.  As long as
>>    the number of people joining is reasonable, this might work out well.
>>    This also goes hand in hand with us
>
>
> Hmm... If we're going to let viewers in, then I'd recommend per-talk BBB 
> rooms. The downside is that there's more of a moderation burden. I'd 
> recommend using a collaborative pad for questions instead. Then the questions 
> can be clearly organized, the speakers may even be able to monitor it 
> themselves, it'll be auto-documented, and we don't have to worry about 
> overloading BBB. If someone can keep an eye on IRC and put questions into the 
> collaborative pad, that would be even better.

+1

I like pushing all questions to a pad; I also like being flexible and
staying out of the way of presenters who may be pulling things
directly from IRC.  The only obvious danger I see would be if a
presenter could be too focused on IRC and not see questions that came
from a different channel (broadly ment).   Perhaps some coaching to
the effect of:

SWAG:  Volunteers will be moving questions into a share note pad.  You
are also welcome to pull questions directly from the conference IRC
channels however please do glance and the pad now and again during the
QA to make sure you see questions passed privately to the organizers.

Having people accessing BBB would be great but I think we won't be
ready with experimentation and documentation to count on it being
robust and easy for people.

>    As such, besides the main streamer (likely me), some of us will
>    likely need to volunteer to stream and/or record the off-track
>    portion of such talks and to take over when the main streamer moves
>    on to the next talk.  Those of you who have a machine with decent
>    specs would you please volunteer to help with this?

I have a raging beast of a machine and various tools such as OBS
already setup.  No amount of local data storage is likely to be a
problem given I can record directly out to our FreeNAS server.  I will
test this and advise if I may be disc space bound.  Otherwise I'm
happy to record/stream/whatever helps.  I also have, via the
dugneon-mode project, a pretty nice VM on gigbit fiber in the Chicago
area.  I can setup RTMP or other things there if it will help.  We've
got X + VNC going so, in potential, this would make a
streaming/recording platform for a second volunteer beside myself.  We
are limited to around 25GB of usable space in that environment.

-- 
Corwin
612-217-1742
612-695-4276 (signal)
corwin@bru.st