Planning of Meet.coop Xmas party

Make sure we all confirm that we are GOING in the Party thread :partying_face:
meet.coop_Xmas_party_2020_200px

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I created an Update on OpenCollective to announce the Xmas party. Thatā€™s sending notification emails to 69 backers.

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Perfect :slight_smile: thanks for doing this, seems like a useful ā€œmailing listā€ and keeps track of history, makes our OC more lively.

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?

Nice to meet you Nick :slight_smile: @elon is the expert in this domain and has done similar for events, tagging him in!

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Hey @NickM are you trying to have the artist preform on BBB? Audio over WebRTC anything other than voice such as music wonā€™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 presenterā€™s view to all the viewers but not sure if it will work with live streams.

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We have had issues with the youtube play and sync where some users donā€™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 ā€œquiteā€ 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. Iā€™m guessing this is some kind of normalization that is occurring.

The problem with ā€œLIVEā€ 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 ā€œCastingā€ 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 donā€™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.

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That would be greatā€¦ 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 streamā€¦ The sync of audience reaction with the performance wouldnā€™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 itā€™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!

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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!

Are we missing anything else in terms of planning? A little out of the loop on this thread.

I just converted the Xmas Party event into a banner, so no forum user will miss it :wink:

thereā€™s stuff to do until Friday:

  1. make sure our colleagues, members and prospects are aware and show up
  2. create a more detailed plan for the session
  3. test the music performance set up (I expect @Yurko has the lead and letā€™s us know when we can test any experimental setup) or worst case weā€™ll have to deal with the default room setup

Hereā€™s a possible schedule for the Xmas Party - please amend here in the thread

  • 16:00 GMT - Main Meeting Room opens (the same as we use for All Hands meetings)
  • Breakouts about ā€œWhy meet.coop?ā€
  • Update on where we are and how we got here
  • The meet.coop roadmap
  • 17:00 GMT musical performance - trial
  • open mike

I just replied in the Resonate forum

Hi Resonate!
Is anyone up for this? If so, please email contact@meet.coop asap so we have time to plan how things will work and to promote you to our lovely community :wink:

I guess if we donā€™t hear back there will not be any musicā€¦ but if we do weā€™ll have to crack on with some organization!

Iā€™m worried that the rest of the agenda looks more like a work meeting than a party - and that there may be very limited attendance because of this but - cā€™est la vie I guessā€¦

it would be surprising if weā€™d be a large crowd indeed. But donā€™t give up and invite some around you :slight_smile:

And please suggest improvements. Which questions would you like to pose to the group? Questions that we could ask people to position themselvesā€¦

I feel attendance will be ok. Hypha alone should have 5-6 members attending, and a couple of us sent invites to larger groups, so I am expecting maybe 30?

no answers in the Resonate forum so no music anymoreā€¦ just FYI

sorry to hear that about the music :frowning:
Maybe anybody of us dares to make some performance of any kind?

my thoughts for the Xmas party gathering is that we meet up and according to who and how many we are we decide what to do at every moment. In order to help a bit, Iā€™ve copied some of the possible activities into a slide and added a few placeholders to that, see here

Now Iā€™m preparing a slide to see the evolution of members by month. It would also be good to present the roadmap, if anyone can convert draw it out (Georgia told me she cannot do it this week, as she just moved house). If no one is able to pick it up, maybe I could do so tomorrow just before the gathering

Anything else you could prepare or would like to do/see?

This sounds more realistically, logistically:)

the Party Room for today: https://ca.meet.coop/b/xms-7vw-cmg-jt0
cu there at 16h

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