Hi list!
I belong to a science group at my university. We promote science and critical thinking by doing events with experts about different topics. We try to get science to the people.
Our public activities have stopped due to the pandemics. We're considering doing them online. We have community principles and we're trying to adopt libre software (we're spanish speakers). Right now our site uses mezzanine, a free python CMS and it's using Debian 10 as its OS. We have mailman3 as our email communication tool and we've been using Jitsi Meet for our internal coordination meetings. Sadly, we don't have the resources to have our own hardware infrastructure so we use a VPS in digitalocean.
Our events are small. The most popular one has, at most, 60 attendants. The average is between 25 and 30 people. The experts talk for a while (around 45 to 60 minutes) and then the participants can intervene. We'd like to allow them to talk by microphone, only in the second part. We're not sure how many people we'll have when we go online, but we want to use free software as much as we can. By reading this mailing list, I think that for an open talk with only a couple of people (the experts and the moderator) the best bet is BigBlueButton. As it's a tool aimed at education, it seems to provide good tools for our purpose.
I'm writing to the list to obtain guidance. First, ¿is there a more recommended VPS, or an alternative?. We really don't have the resources for our own machines and the university is in no position right now to provide them (the talks were made in company with the library, but they don't have the resources either). DigitalOcean has a problem; if we turn off the machines they still charge us. We can pay for a machine with the requirements for BBB, only by the hour, and only the big names like AWS, GCC or Azure seem to charge like that. We want to avoid especially those big companies.
Second of all, is there an alternative for live streaming with free software?. The common answer in Jitsi lists when there are many participants is using Youtube, but we don't want to use Google. If they're the only option, we'd rather not live stream.
Thanks for any suggestion. We owe a lot to the free software community, especially in these times.