I am sorry to see that none of us has been very active in proposing and preparing the Xmas party proposal - except for @garyalex! I’d hope for us to gather that Friday 11th. But maybe we should reduce expectations a bit, given everyone being so busy and we might not be able to mobilise that many people?
Gary’s proposal sounds really nice, however, and maybe we should give it a try and see who we can invite. All may be more improvised and informal, depending on the people joining and putting time into this.
Some thoughts:
what if every member organisation (and anyone reading this!) would invite their team to sign up for the event?
what if each of us we’d reach out to a few friends around us to invite them to have fun with meet.coop on our little pre-Xmas gathering?
it would be nice if someone could perform, music or otherwise, and if we find someone volunteering for that, that would be excellent, if not, we’ll still have fun
we can always do the speed dating in a few break out rooms, and ask everyone to think of their key motivation to be part of meetcoop (and then feed it back into a pad or plenary session or so)
having a fishbowl discussion about some key topics affecting meetcoop could be ok, if it’s not too long - it’s a party after all.
during the All hands the day before we can discuss the final details of the programme
Yes @wouter. Good suggestions. From my experience, I suggest that it needs more than a message in this Forum for the invitations to actually happen. Bring it up in the All Hands meeting today (which I can’t attend, bad timing), and in the Working Groups. Individual personal messages to key people!
I am happy to help, but need to be part of a small team if this party is to succeed. (And I would like to show you what I have been doing to prepare for our Yule Party.)
sounds good - and if someone could follow up on this request from Nick it would be great…
I have struggled to log in to the Resonate forum and have asked for help - but maybe others will succeed where I have failed…
aha - you have to have an invite to post in the Resonate forum - I posted this:
Hi All,
Thanks Nick - Yes, we (at Meet.coop - The online video conferencing co-op ) would like to invite you to come and party with us on BigBlueButton (the open source video conferencing tool we run for our members) - and to see if we can tempt one or two of you to perform for us!
We only have an embarrassingly low budget of 100 GBP for one band or 75 GBP each for two …
We realise this is not adequate payment but wondered if someone might be up for performing anyway and, in the spirit of cooperation we could also probably also offer free Level 1 membership to Meet.coop for a year (worth £108) too if you’d like - so you can ditch Zoom!
Length of set/s: between 20 & 40 mins - we might run these in parallel rooms if we have 2 different bands / artists… TBC
Platform - we will run this on BBB, you will get a URL invite and will simply need to click on the link to join to play. It will help if you have a good microphone (and camera) connected to your laptop to deliver the best quality sound. Please arrive early to test things and get familiar with BBB. Simple acoustic sets might be best for the web audio… but we’re really open to all suggestions! Remember, it’s a party and we want to celebrate - so it would be nice to have some reasonably upbeat music…
If you’re up for it please reply here with a link to somewhere we can check out a sample of your work - presumably a Resonate link!
And let me know if you have any questions or suggestions?
Cheers
Oli
@osb, I’d feel more comfortable if the new thread was started by you, so if you give me your ok, I can change the ownership of the first post to be yours.
BTW I’m also resonate member and can login to the thread there, so I will keep an eye on it.
I have created a little meme to visualise the event. My design skills aren’t great though so feel free to improve (link to ODP file in /Product/coms/events/Xmas)
Let’s not do two rooms. The entire party session is only 1.5 h, we should have a single room and only have one or two 10min performances. I think most ppl actually come to chat and hang out. It also makes our 75 GBP ask pretty generous if it’s for just 10min?
Hey Ben! Nice to meet you on the call last night! Nick Meyne here with a query about artist audio setups for the entertainers. Do you know if we could improve the quality / stability of the artist audio by using say OBS to link to a youtube (or twitch, or other?) livestream platform channel, and then use that link in BBB, or whether it would be better to just use BBB audio / video capture and tweak the BBB settings somehow to give the artist some bandwidth priority?
Hey @NickM are you trying to have the artist preform on BBB? Audio over WebRTC anything other than voice such as music won’t sound as good as if it was on live stream platforms but trade off is there is a delay over live streams where as BBB would be instant.
I know BBB have an option for sharing Youtube videos which sync the seek position with the presenter’s view to all the viewers but not sure if it will work with live streams.
We have had issues with the youtube play and sync where some users don’t seek correctly. It got very confusing when trying to discuss the video as it was playing.
Audio on BBB is designed for voice, it suppresses “quite” noises which means the volume must be over the threshold at all times. There is also echo cancellation that is implemented to reduce feed back, and may create some undesired suppression when others are talking.
I ran music through a BBB instance a few weeks ago to do a long-term test of the rooms. It worked fairly well but i noticed that at the beginning of the track it would be a bit louder then taper off to a normal level after a few seconds. I’m guessing this is some kind of normalization that is occurring.
The problem with “LIVE” anything is buffers. For conference calls you need as close to 0 buffer as you can get so there is no delay. This creates allot of audio distortions if users are on a poor connection. Youtube and other “Casting” platforms have the luxury for having bigger buffers. This helps the end user be able to store some data ahead of where they are watching to be used when there is a momentary disruption in the system.
At Hypha we increased the jitter buffer a bit and don’t seem to have any ill effects as of yet, but this will only help with momentarily issues of a person speaking, not necessary the receiver.
One interesting solution could be to have the BBB in an iframe, and create a player row at the top. This would link to YouTube Live.
This would bypass BBB, give individual users to change the volume of the music.
That would be great… Could we test that out in time for the Xmas party on 11th? I like the idea of the BBB audience in an Iframe within a YouTube stream… The sync of audience reaction with the performance wouldn’t matter so much. We could mute BBB audio until the end of the performance?
interesting experiment, when could we try that out, @yurko? I think it’s great to do some of these experimental stuff also during the Xmas party, as long as we have tested it with a few before.
and thanks @NickM to mobilse a musician from the Resonate network!
Hey Wouter! Yes, excited about this! Myself, I looked at OBS and found a bewildering list of streaming hosts that I could livestream to. YouTube Live seemed the obvious one, but I have no idea which would work best for us. Some of these services take a couple of days to set up with approval if they are new to the artist. Maybe it is best to ask the artist what they prefer or have worked with before and try that? If we get this right, I think there will be lots of interest!
I just converted the Xmas Party event into a banner, so no forum user will miss it
there’s stuff to do until Friday:
make sure our colleagues, members and prospects are aware and show up
create a more detailed plan for the session
test the music performance set up (I expect @Yurko has the lead and let’s us know when we can test any experimental setup) or worst case we’ll have to deal with the default room setup
so feel free to improve (link to ODP 
