Open Stack

On Wed, May 27, 2020, at 1:36 PM, Thomas Goirand wrote:
> On 5/26/20 8:06 PM, Kendall Nelson wrote:
> > For each virtual PTG meeting room, we will provide an official Zoom
> > videoconference room, which will be reused by various groups across the
> > day.

This is what you snipped out of the previous email:

> > OpenDev's Jitsi Meet instance is also available at 
> > https://meetpad.opendev.org as an alternative tooling option to create 
> > team-specific meetings. This is more experimental and may not work as 
> > well for larger groups, but has the extra benefit of including etherpad 
> > integration (the videoconference doubles as an etherpad document, 
> > avoiding jumping between windows). PTGBot can be used to publish the 
> > chosen meeting URL if you decide to not use the official Zoom one. The 
> > OpenDev Sysadmins can be reached in the #opendev IRC channel if any 
> > problems arise.

> Sorry for ranting, but I can't help it on this topic...
> 
> I really think it's a shame that it's been decided on a non-free video
> conference service. Why aren't we self-hosting it, and using free
> software instead of Zoom, which on top of this had major security
> problems recently?

As noted in the portion of the email you removed: we are. The OpenDev team has been working to ensure that Jitsi Meet is ready to go (just today we added in the ability to scale up jvb processes to balance load), but it is a very new service to us and alternatives are a good thing. We're going to try and estimate usage ahead of time and from that be ready for Monday. If you're testing it this week or having trouble next week please let us know. We're going to do our best, but it will likely be a learning experience.

As another option my understanding is that Zoom supports quite large rooms which may be necessary for some groups that are meeting. And it is good to have a backup, particularly since we haven't done this before (and that applies in both directions, it is entirely possible some people using Zoom may find meetpad is a better fit and those trying meetpad may want to switch to Zoom for reasons). Zoom provides dial in numbers for much of the world (though not all of it), as well as providing a web client that doesn't require you to install any additional software beyond your web browser.

Clark