CommunityBridge

CommunityBridge looks interesting, it appears to be WordPress with the BBB plugin, I came accross it via this thread:

Perhaps someone could attend and report back on how well this works?

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Hi @chris!

This site was offered to us by Agaric.

It’s basically a wordpress with a BBB plugin that works very well. It’s very easy to create rooms and manage them. If you are interested, I can ask Micky from the Agaric cooperative to join this discussion.

Also, you are invited to participate in the S&T so we can test the room and talk about a topic related to the business model of a platform cooperative that bases its business on a product. I think it has a lot to do with this community.

This Friday, June 26th at 3 PM UTC.

Join us!

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Hi Chris,

I am using BBB on CommunityBridge with the Wordpress plugin and so far it has been excellent!!!
The folks from HOPE.net did a BBB stress test a few days ago and we had over 40 people in one room with all of our cameras on and at one point all of our mics - and it was smooth as can be!! here are the serve specs they sent me:

From Dante:
We didn’t use anything fancy for this first test, it’s just a Hetzner VPS with 8 dedicated cores and 16GB of RAM. We peaked CPU usage at around 500%, meaning 5 full cores were in use out of the 8 available. It was the simplest install, just a regular bbb-install.sh, following the docs.

BBB claims their minimum server requirement supports up to 100 people in a call. But concurrent users isn’t a good metric by itself, performance will vary greatly depending on how many are just listeners, how many have their microphones enabled and video or screen sharing enabled. According to their docs, screen sharing is the most resource intensive. I am confident we could have had 100 users in our test, if we didn’t go past 5 video feeds and maybe 10 speakers.

Our plan now is to use a Scalelite cluster, and have 3 BBB servers running, and a separate front-end. We haven’t finish all specs for the cluster, but now that we think BBB will work for the workshops, we’ll work on it.
Dante.

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We did a stress test on our own BBB server and had 60> people chatting and about 20 cameras on. Not one tech support request and all attendees were new to BBB!!!
Success!
Today I am setting up an integration with self-hosted Canvas LMS to host 300 BBB concurrent chatters in 10 rooms of about 30 people. Will update here soon!

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Things are still going really well - teachers and students are very happy with the BBB setup and some students have created rooms to mentor other students! No real tech support issues from 800 students and 60+ teachers! WOOT! We started having Movie Nights on CommunityBridge - I added a form so people can suggest movies. So far it is working really well. I am looking forward to moving to meet.coop services ASAP. Right now we are using 207group as a BBB host, but will move to meet.coop hosting for BBB. Will need canvas integration and also looking for how to use GreenLight to set up rooms similarly to what WordPress offers. This is my first time using WordPress and it is great for BBB integration, but limited in things like design as far as I can see - I may just need a different theme or something. I do not like the way WP tries to sell you stuff at every turn…

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Where does the need for canvas arise from Micky? 800 students and 60+ teachers is a lot of people :wink: What kind of user base is that?

I know Canvas is very widely used especially in the US but from my limited personal experience (in a MOOC for ‘economic transformation’ activists last year, organised by Synergia) it’s nothing to shout about, and its forums seemed pretty primitive - not even as useable as Discourse. I don’t know Moodle (for example, which has had a lot of work put into the social network side by fediverse advocates) so would be glad to understand better the pros and cons of various front-end environments that folks might be coming from, wanting to use BBB rooms.

I do suspect that a lot of the future of BBB (=meet.coop) lies in the various ecosystems of other tools, that BBB might be reached from, and woven together with in practice. Some of these may be established commitments (like yours?) and some might be prompted, as new toolsets that might be adopted in various communities (as with collective.tools and the NextCloud stack, I think?) @petter .

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It would be awesome to get you into meet.coop :slight_smile:

Could you provide some more details?

  • Do you know the server specs?
  • Do you have any data of what the maximum number of concurrent users has been so far?
  • You said that you need Canvas integration, does that just mean you need the BBB api secret to use with Canvas or do you need additional Canvas hosting and support?
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I have joined the forum - not sure I can read it easily. have been
trying to find out when a meeting happens. My partners from Agaric are
also interested in joining . We are connected to Jamie McClelland of
MayFirst and I am a board member - we actively want to be meet.coop
members and help to build a US presence.
As for the BBB instance we are using now, it is outsourced as we wait to
get on a meet.coop instance as soon as possible. So i do not have the
server data. We have had chats with 60 people in a room that went very
well.
We did do a stress test a month ago and had 60 people in a room without
issues. Most were first time users of BBB.

In Solidarity,

Micky Metts
Agaric ~ FreeScholar
https://agaric.coop - We are your Cooperative Tech Ally.
Ask me about Agaric’s Online Learning Classrooms - http://agaric.com/online-learning

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Meeting slots have just been rescheduled. The rota now is

  • All-hands call - Thursday 15:00 CET
  • Product circle - Friday 12:00 CET
  • Organisational circle - Friday - 13:00 CET

Weekly at present but thinning out when firefighting is done (!). All meetings in MEET.COOP MAIN MEETING ROOM

AFAIK the front end (Canvas, Wordpress, NextCloud etc) needs to run on the same physical server as the BBB instance. So to migrate your current BBB setup to meet.coop would require us to mount Wordpress/Canvas on the meet.coop production server - or a dedicated server? This is more than meet.coop can handle in the very short term, sysadminwise. So something to discuss here, about timing and planning?

No they don’t need to run on the same server and this is also highly advised against by BigBlueButton. Greenlight is often deployed together to the same server but Greenlight is a quite small and simple application compared to Wordpress or even Nextcloud.

They just need the API secret of the server to use them with the frontends.

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Hmmm, we used a Secret token and are NOT running things on the same
server as BBB now. Not sure how that would be different, but will surely
look into things and start the appropriate conversation when we are
ready on our side!

In Solidarity,

Micky Metts
Agaric ~ FreeScholar
https://agaric.coop - We are your Cooperative Tech Ally.
Ask me about Agaric’s Online Learning Classrooms - http://agaric.com/online-learning

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I was mistaken Micky. See Henning’s reply. Yes, secret token, and not the same server.

Hi @freescholar It would be great to have Agaric’s expectations of the meet.coop ‘brand’ in @osb’s survey here. @mlncn

Likewise from MayFirst @jamie ?

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