Those working remotely or managing a distributed team know it: face time is invaluable. The former openSUSE team has been using http://sqwiggle.com to keep in touch and Google hangout to hold a stand up meeting every morning.
We like the Sqwiggle approach. Although the last updates have made it worse, the concept of having a peep to your colleagues' desks to know if they are there (even if they are working hard or just talking to someone) and the possibility of starting a video conversation just clicking on the face shot can do a lot in reducing distances (and in killing the temptation of working naked for home-officers).
The goal is to research the possibilities to create a system allowing:
- Video presence (that is, a face shot of every team member smoothly updated every 20 seconds of so)
- Video calls with "unlimited" participants
Everything should work in a web browser and switching between modes should be as easy as possible.
It's probably too ambitious to achieve in a week just for me, but I want to take the opportunity to at least learn some AngularJS, now that I'm more disconnected from web development since my switch to the Yast team.
This project is part of:
Hack Week 11
Activity
Comments
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about 10 years ago by aspiers | Reply
This would be great! As a remote worker I can really appreciate the idea of Sqwiggle's presence feature, even though I never tried it yet.
I heard that at least one team internally has been testing http://bigbluebutton.org/ which is LGPL - perhaps presence could be added to that?
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about 10 years ago by ancorgs | Reply
Bigbluebutton is implemented in Flex, with a Flash interface and hosted in a svn repo. Quite far away from the idea of fun hacking to me.
I would rather go for Palava: Ruby + AngularJS + Coffescript and hosted in Github. Sounds like something I can setup in less than a week and a nice excuse to dive into Angular. And I already know Ruby (quite well) and Coffescript (to some degree).
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about 10 years ago by dmacvicar | Reply
We use BigBlueButton internally and kind of works. We are happy with it. Our colleagues in Italy suffer with the lag sometimes. Palava did not work. It is browser to browser so the bandwidth requirements grow very fast, unlike solutions using a server to multiplex the stream (with Palava you have one connection per participant to your machine, with a server you only have one connection and the server mixes and everything)
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about 10 years ago by ancorgs | Reply
After some initial research, I'm focusing on replacing sqwiggle, not in replacing Google Hangouts, BigBlueButton or OpenMeetings.
To actually join in something beyond testing, just mail me. In the meantime, you can follow my findings here https://github.com/ancorgs/hackweek11 and here https://etherpad.nue.suse.com/p/hackweek-videocalls
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about 10 years ago by ancorgs | Reply
I already have a protototype (kudos to maxlin for the packaging tasks) that, beside some stability problems, seems to work with an small amount of people. I would like to stress it performance wise as much as possible, to find out the best possible configuration parameters (resolution, bitrate, etc). Time to contribute as testers!
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about 10 years ago by ancorgs | Reply
Final update. The demo (just a prototype, not proper UI or advanced features yet) is hosted at http://tortuga.suse.de:8000/ Since it's just a regular workstation and we need it for other purposes, it will not be available forever. But feel free to take a look. At the moment the demo only works with Chrom(e/ium) and Firefox Nightly (that should be fixed in the short term). Please, don't visit it with any other browser (it's still not very robust). Ping me if you have any problem or whether it works but you feel lonely there.
Check this for more info: https://etherpad.nue.suse.com/p/hackweek-videocalls
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about 10 years ago by ancorgs | Reply
Just one more note (that I considered obvious but is not). You need a webcam (or similar device) to join. It's a video system after all.
Properly formatted links: demo at tortuga etherpad
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