yes please - I think from our discussions this morning we determined ‘invite only’ will best
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These are the main sticking points we think need addressing to make BBB viable for OPEN 2020:
- Removing the need to allow camera, mic and do the echo test on joining, entry to breakout rooms and when re-joining the main room again
- Enabling more than 8 breakout rooms
- Several elements related to the ‘display’ issue:
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- A way that the presenter (or Admin) can turn off the whiteboard for everyone
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- Allow the presenter make the presentation full screen for everyone
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- Allow full screen Speaker view
We will also want to have our own custom message at the top of the chat - will fwd text for that, if you can let me know who can do this for us?
There may be more issues as we test more - but these are the big ones for now…
Unless other people have more!?
Oli
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I have one more. When a person enters BBB the screen looks very complex - four separate fields of stuff in view. This is in strong contrast to Zoom, where the default view is just the faces of participants. Which is kinda what you want to see?
Can the default view be altered, to be zoom-like? As simple as possible.
Perhaps this is another version of the ‘push layouts’ issue? Whatever . . it would help folks get acclimatised to BBB. Took me a whole sesssion to learn to switch things off, first time in BBB! And still takes up attention.
Oh, and one more . . it’s a pain in the butt to have to tell the system FOUR times that, yes, you can use my camera. Could this be reduced to a single click?
I have opened this issue for now for these problems:
Hey folks, just to follow up on these sticking points.
@Yurko has done a solid investigation and the ability to disable multiple mic tests is coming in the following release. It is quite involved to back-port this into our current setup, so we’re hoping this can be OK for now. We’ll be waiting for the following release.
@chrisc identified that this limitation is due to an underlying technology and cannot be configured at this time. There is a potential work-around proposed by @Yurko. Again, we’d wait for the following release.
I see that we can change the default room text, this would work? If you want to DM me the text, I can set this up.
Customisations like these are quite wide sweeping. It does seem like there is a facility to configure the web client (see these docs) but it is unclear whether we can do these specific things. It may be useful to start a new issue with the upstream development team to get the ball rolling: Issues · bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton · GitHub.
We are hoping that these issues can be temporarily worked-around with facilitation and guidance from the room organisers!
I think, if all users need to make 8 to 10 clicks to enter the space and enable their camera and mic every time we do a breakout session…
and we can not enable more than 8 breakout rooms
and the views issues remain…
Then the platform is not really fit for our needs…
Do you know when the new release might happen?
Do you think this will be before next week Thursday?
If not I think we may have to head back to using zoom 
I do not want to go back into the arms of zoom 
but like @osb my experience of BBB sessions right now is too klunky to risk the UX of our conference participants, and the success of our sessions. I guess our requirements for multiple breakouts are quite stringent. And we must plan for large sessions.
I do hope there is more leeway than @decentral1se implied. But as facilitators our Open2020 team will need very soon to settle on the environment that will be used live in six days from now, so we can rehearse our act.
This is a tactical crunch - it doesn’t affect my support for the meet.coop project, which I believe is significant.
a few more questions RE BBB:
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Is the test server we are on now (e.g. my room/s at https://dev.meet.coop/b/oli-eeq-m9l ) going to be where we will be hosting the event (if we use BBB) or will it be a new URL / different server? if different, when will we have access to this?
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Is there a way to have more than 1 main Admin - i.e. people with permissions to present AND move people into breakout rooms ?
- is there a way to download the video recordings? I can see how to email a link but not to download
I can appreciate the UI changes suggested, but understand that several of them won’t be easily solved in the coming few days. Let us see what we can accomplish all together.
On the side of facilitation of the users, how would this scenario look:
- have the plenary room configured to have users join as Listeners: it’s the quickest way to tune into the session from any device (this morning I logged into a meeting at demo over gprs and could listen well, imagine)
- at opening of the day and at some other moments during the conf we have a Meet.coop instruction moment, with a quick explanation of how people can activate their mike, webcam (but not all at once please if a large crowd), how one can play with the view, with webcams only, or select one cam to be bigger, with/without whiteboard, polls, and when presenters/moderators activate collective writing on the whiteboard how that works…
it will be different, at the main meet.coop server that Chris is now getting access to deploy the same exact software. We’ll quickly invite you to register again. The machine will be basically all yours.
Yes sure, when configuring a room you can share access with other registered users. Did you try that?
I don’t think a major BigBlueButton version will be out for a while (there isn’t a alpha release yet and after that there would be release candidate versions, 2.0.0 came out on 8th April 2019 after 12 RC versions), I anticipate that for this year we will probably we will be on 2.2.x versions. Have a browse of the releases here to get an idea of the rate of releases and what is getting fixed with each version.
It is slightly annoying that a session cookie isn’t set to indicate that the mic and speakers are working after one audio test and that you have to click a few time between rooms, but as has been said above there isn’t an easy fix for this, but as people get used it perhaps it won’t be too bad? It will probably reduce the number of people joining rooms and reporting their issues to everyone — the point of it is to allow users to check that everything is working before they join a meeting.
Regarding the breakout room limit, this is based on some underlying tech that limits the number of rooms to 8. Were you thinking or running all the sessions in breakout rooms — is this why it is an issue? I’d suggest creating as many rooms as you expect to have sessions running in parallel and then put the URL of each meeting room on the agenda, each of these rooms can have 8 break out rooms and if more are needed create some additional rooms to host breakout rooms in advance?
Set the main rooms to only be open to authenticated users and this, combined with people needing to buy a ticket in order to have an account, will mean that anyone trying to “Zoom bomb” a meeting will first need to buy a ticket and once they have had their access revoked after misbehaving would need to buy another… hopefully this will be enough…
I think having a public page on which people have the whole agenda and links to all the session rooms, informal chat hang-out type rooms and plenary rooms, in advance, would really help, it should allow people to bookmark the agenda and then flit between rooms fairly easily without getting lost.
I appreciate that rehearsals and testing is needed in advance and that time is tight.
The dev server, dev.meet.coop is set to invite only and you can use this for testing as much as you like.
The demo server, demo.meet.coop is open for anyone to have a play on it — I’d suggest, if you decide to use meet.coop for the event, that you let everybody who has a ticket, plus people you want to encourage to buy tickets, know that they can test BigBlueButton in advance using this server.
However note that dev.meet.coop and demo.meet.coop might well be down on occasions, for very short periods, as we test things and do upgrades.
We do now have the production server up and running, ca.meet.coop and www.meet.coop and meet.coop will redirect here when it is ready. I hope to have it ready for Monday. There are quite a few things that need doing first and I expect I’ll be doing 12 hour days on Saturday and Sunday to sort everything out, first we need to sort out the disk partitions.
As soon as we are confident that the server is ready we will let you have admin accounts on it to set things up.
I believe that @decentral1se has fixed the recordings issue and also the conversion of the recording into .mp4 format, so downloads will be available.
I appreciate that what we are offering isn’t the corporate service that people might have become accustomed to during lockdown.
This is an experiment to try to build something new, we are making it up as we go along, the best we can, with a belief that a better world is possible, there will be hiccups on the way but I’m quietly confident that we might pull this one off, but it is going to take a lot of work and we are still at the start of the journey.
I think it would benefit meet.coop and open.coop if we undertake this journey together, on the understanding that we are breaking new ground and we might falter on the way, but we are both heading in the same direction and the journey might be perhaps a little harder, but more exciting and quicker if we take some short cuts together and ride the crest of the wave rather than waiting for other pioneers and following in their wake.
I hope you do decide to use meet.coop for Open 2020, I know we are going to get very little sleep for the next week if you do, but I think it’ll be worth it.
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Definitely recommend this:
Facilitating large calls is really difficult, and putting people into breakouts makes everything a lot more confusing.
I was in a 100+ people Zoom call once, and then we broke out into 8 rooms, except they didn’t have enough room licenses so once a new room got created, some rooms got shut down. I was in one of those rooms so my session ended. Then there isn’t an agenda where I can go straight back to the room I want to be in, so I just left.
In my call with Diego today, for the Dat event, we talked about the 8 breakout limit too. They are planning to pre-create room links on a website, there will never be attempts to split to > 8 breakouts.
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I read through the thread and want to put my conference organizer hat on to comment on this. Some questions for @osb @mikemh:
- Do you now have a pretty accurate idea of how many people will participate in OPEN 2020 now?
- What is the reason you want to use breakout rooms?
- Do you have an agenda for the event?
- How many parallel tracks are you running?
- Have you written the communication to facilitators on digital tools, and if not when do you need to send it? Is there any pre-event gathering with facilitators?
- When do you have to make a call on all your digital tools?
Here are my suggestions:
- I would set a date with Meet.coop to evaluate the final platform, finalized configs on the production servers. Make a call based on that exact server and software, no changes are to be made after that date.
- Whether you use BBB, on Meet.coop or otherwise, or Zoom, plan for the platform to fail and have a backup strategy. (e.g. for Our Networks 2019 remote presentations, if Zoom failed we go to Hangout, and this was our communication to presenters).
- Don’t do the breakouts the way you envision it. It’s really hard to manage. Make rooms ahead of time, make sure those links are in the hands of participants before the event and they know where to go without day-of intervention.
- I think Open Publishing Festival has a really nice model where they seem to provide a BBB instance but many sessions are on other platforms. It makes the event not fail on a single point.
- Disable the notepad in the UI, it’s very easy to configure. Hypha’s instance has it disabled, because it’s shit confusing to have both chat and notepad.
- There are probably other things that can be worked around or have mitigation strategies.
Now with my Meet.coop hat, I think it’s strategically important that we have OPEN 2020 do a large session on here, so we hit a milestone, and can look at server behaviour and have one case study. It’s less critical that the entire event is on Meet.coop. So I feel making that possible is the best way to support the initiative, although with the right planning it’s totally possible that the entire event can be on Meet.coop.
If it helps, I am happy to have a call with you guys to discuss this from an event planning perspective.
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I do fully recognise and resonate with what @chris wrtote:
This is an experiment to try to build something new, we are making it up as we go along, the best we can, with a belief that a better world is possible, there will be hiccups on the way but I’m quietly confident that we might pull this one off, but it is going to take a lot of work and we are still at the start of the journey.
And I recognise also the good faith and commitment of all involved in production team here.
At the same time, it’s a tough call for me as a session convener, to commit to going live in a few days, with participants newer to the tech than we (the Open2020 team) are, in an attempt to explore complex things with an unknown but possiibly large number of people . . with the tech as I experienced it today. Running a large conference session on complex issues is hard enough, before these kinds of difficulty and unfamiliarity are added.
I do understand that meet.coop doesn’t want to fail in this initial project and will pull out the stops: thank you. But Open2020 doesn’t want to fail either, at running a challenging conference. I’m by no means saying that as a session convener I wouldn’t go ahead if support seems solid (open2020 and meet.coop, both). But it is a tough call, and at this moment I’m unsure whether I myself have the stops to pull out, with what we were working with today (including our own inexperience) that will make a session work well enough for participants to feel it was a success.
I’m waiting on the sense of this that emerges among fellow conveners and facilitators, over the next day or (maybe) two.
Seems to me, this kind of advice is good, thanks . .
I think having a public page on which people have the whole agenda and links to all the session rooms, informal chat hang-out type rooms and plenary rooms, in advance, would really help, it should allow people to bookmark the agenda and then flit between rooms fairly easily without getting lost.
. . and we need to work hard on these kinds of design in the next couple of days. These are not so much fixes, more like kinds of facilitative skill that are new in the repertoire of a virtual gathering. I would be happy if participants feel able to ‘flit between rooms’ 
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Good things here @benhylau thanks, including this:
Make rooms ahead of time, make sure those links are in the hands of participants before the event
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Happy to disable the Etherpad for Open 2020 if required, we only just worked out how to enable it, but as a result we also know how to disable it!
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FWIW I think I personally would rather use an Etherpad in a separate browser window, independently created (and url posted in the BBB chat) than have one inside the already crowded space of the BBB window.
Thanks for all the feedback and suggestions:
We WILL start on BBB whatever happens
We DO have a backup plan - it’s called Zoom…
However, we want to make the BBB open source experience as good as possible for everyone!
These are the things which will make it impossible to convince people to stick with BBB:
The echo text / turn on your mic / camera issue every-time you join a new room.
I understand this is not a simple fix - but if there is any way we can hack / add something to avoid it it would be VERY much appreciated
I understand there is a limit on breakout rooms - but the suggestion to use other rooms isn’t really viable because:
- Users will need to mute themselves in the original room or it buggers up the sound - plus even if they do it sucks up more bandwidth and the audio experience seems to degrade
- They still have to go through the echo test etc
So we might just use another platform for breakouts - BBB just doesn’t seem to cut it for our needs atm 
One more significant issue - which could still stop us using the BBB platform altogether:
How do I download a video of a session???
And if we can work out how to do this - can we get the video of the panel AND the presentation/s in the same video without needing to edit it all together manually afterwards??? I see (when I play a “presentation” (video) in BBB) the videos of the people, and presentation, and the slide list all seem to be separate elements… Any ideas??
Cheers
Oli