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Re: Improving WebRTC video conferencing


From: Yasuaki Kudo
Subject: Re: Improving WebRTC video conferencing
Date: Thu, 16 Jul 2020 12:39:18 +0900

Hi Gerald,

Thank you for your reply!  Sorry I was probably not clear because my idea 
itself is still forming 😅

To give same examples, I think somehow we can achieve a much more participatory 
civic software production by having federated communities weaving together a 
web of software requirements, in the same way we have the constitution, laws 
and regulations.  (But strictly voluntary of course, not forced 😄)

And I think, if we have the 'right-minded' set of rules, Free Software will 
naturally be part of those requirements and proprietary software will be 
disqualified.

I think one significant component not directly addressed by Free Software 
movement (please correct me if I am wrong) is the advocacy of protocols and 
APIs.   In the truly participatory environment where everybody in the society 
is engaged in cooperation (rather than competition), I think our software 
ecosystem will be deeply influenced by the need for compliance to protocols, 
interoperability, etc.  

I think we can achieve so much more, if our civic society is more involved with 
defining electronic communication protocols.  Our civic society also needs to 
define all kinds of others, including trade or contracting protocols for 
e-commerce, food deliveries, etc.

Instead, it almost seems we sit and watch what capitalist companies will throw 
at us next by selling the convenience and low visible price, letting them 
dominate, make protocols "irrelevant", reduce democracy and increase oligopoly.

It is almost pollution to me that so many members of our society use 
advertisement-and-surveillance-driven platforms such as FaceB.  

Free Software is great and I am indebted to all those who worked on it.   I 
think we can make it even greater by having our society demand it as part of 
the civicil society reform I hope we will have😄

-Yasu


> On Jul 15, 2020, at 22:57, Gerald Jay Sussman <gjs@csail.mit.edu> wrote:
> 
> 
> Hello Yasuaki Kudo,
> 
> You have a noble idea, but please be more careful: if you try to
> generalize our goal that much you dilute it so it is no longer clear.
> For example, Wikipedia is easily included in your "Societal Knowledge
> Sharing" goal.  They do a great job, but their work should not be part
> of our goal.
> 
> Our goal should be more focussed: to provide excellent Free/Libre
> Software support for interpersonal communication, with a special
> emphasis on educational applications.  This includes all the kinds of
> help that teachers need to enable and enhance communication with
> students and colleagues.  Such technology will be useful for many
> other applications, such as business meetings and government
> committees, as well as for family gatherings.  It must obey the four
> freedoms, but to support education it must also be private, when
> necessary, and be secure enough to protect students' data and
> identities.
> 
> If there are other goals that we should address, perhaps we should
> make projects that address them with similar focus, but we should not
> generalize any one project to be all possible good things, because
> that is not an effective strategy.
> 
> Gerald Jay Sussman
> 
> 
>> Date: Wed, 15 Jul 2020 13:09:21 +0900
>> From: Yasuaki Kudo <yasu@yasuaki.com>
>> Or maybe another way to put it, I think we are looking at the need shift the 
>> focus from "Free Software" to
>> "Societal Knowledge Sharing", the former being a constituent of the latter.
>> Of course, there is even a higher goal of planetary brotherhood 😄, but I 
>> think we can really
>> broaden and deepen the movement if we focus on sharing knowledge - we must 
>> remove the information asymmetry
>> which leads to all sorts of problems...
>> If we focus on getting everybody more educated and and make free software 
>> programs easier to understand for
>> new comers, we will accelerate the speed of development.
>>>> On Jul 15, 2020, at 12:48, Yasuaki Kudo <yasu@yasuaki.com> wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>> I think one way, and this is not just for WebRTC, is to create a huge 
>>> volunteer organization to analyze,
>>> document and add tests to existing free software.
>>> We can make it a fun, inclusive and participatory project, say a 
>>> documentation challenge?  If thousands of
>>> volunteers do this it will be much easier to start improving software,  I 
>>> am sure 😄
>>> Yasu
>>>>>> On Jul 15, 2020, at 03:38, Ian Kelling <iank@fsf.org> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> Jim Garrett <jimgarrett@posteo.net> writes:
>>>>> I've been trying out various Jitsi Meet instances (including the
>>>>> FSF's) and BigBlueButton (BBB) instances and it seems that both could
>>>>> use some improvement.  I think the issue concerns WebRTC but I don't
>>>>> know how to move forward.  I think we're currently failing to match
>>>>> Zoom in quality and we need to figure out how to address the issues
>>>>> below.
>>>>> WebRTC ("Web real-time communications") is a standard implemented in
>>>>> many browsers for interacting with the camera, microphone, and also
>>>>> handling signal processing and encoding/decoding.  I'm not an
>>>>> expert, but it seems that Jitsi Meet and BBB are not really handling
>>>>> the low-level stuff.  So when things don't work, or don't work well
>>>>> enough, how does one fix it?  How do we even diagnose it, when we have
>>>>> a variety of browsers and browser versions?
>>>> I suppose those are questions for the projects and the browsers. There's
>>>> also something like GNU Jami which works outside the browser.
>>>>> There's a question of how we can gather user data for important
>>>>> software improvement efforts while respecting privacy (if in fact data
>>>>> logging is the way to address these issues).  Any thoughts on how to
>>>>> manage this?
>>>> I think it depends on the exact circumstances. Thanks for sharing.
>>>>> Thanks for your thoughts.
>>>>> -Jim Garrett



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