I’m a software engineer contributing to Zinc.coop, where we’re working on a product called Convene, which we envision as digital collaboration spaces containing, among other features, video conferencing.
We’ve been hosting our own video infrastructure (using Jitsi) but we’d love to share the costs of operating the video infra with like-minded folks (be it by paying with $$$, with elbow grease, or a mix of both). Seems like Meet.coop could be a good way for us to join forces with others running video conferencing infrastructure. I’m here to explore what is possible.
Right now my two big questions are:
What would it look like for Zinc to join Meet.coop in a way that lets us build on top of shared video infra? Is that becoming an “operational member”? What would be involved?
What are the technical possibilities for building on top of BBB? In particular, what does it afford in terms of being able to embed the video chat functionality into other sites / apps? (I browsed the BBB docs but they weren’t immediately illuminating. Happy to get pointers to integration docs, if those exist.)
I respect your licensing decision and wish you best of luck - but this would be obviously incompatible with free software and we won’t be able to incorporate this directly into the comprehensive free software packaging system such as GNU Guix… (But I guess it would still be possible to create an independent proprietary addon that can be incorporated by end-users )
Maybe in the future you can reconsider the licensing scheme
Hi @anaulin welcome to the forum, I am an Operational Member here.
Our process is to schedule a discovery call to learn about each other. Usually it makes sense to invite an Operational Member if there is a clear fit with our areas of work that need more hands. At other times we find ways to work together that is mutually supportive, not necessarily as an Operational Member.
Some of us have experience embedding BBB to other places. For example, in this thread. @Yurko may speak to this better technically, but I understand it as pretty straightforward.
As for @Yasuaki’s comment re: license, while BBB is GPL licensed, I think there are ways to interface with a BBB instance via APIs from non-GPL compatible software that is GPL compliant, so I don’t see that as a particular concern. I also feel that asking a maintainer of another project to “[maybe] reconsider the licensing scheme” is inappropriate in this context as it falls out of scope of the original question.
@anaulin I can take a discovery call this week with Convene if you’d like to proceed this week, just to learn about where each other is at. Tagging in @wouter@dvdjaco@osb if they’d like to join. I am ET but they are EU time.
@georgiamoon@bumbleblue there could be some user design convo here wrt how we relate to third-party UI, so cc’ing you. Feel free to involve now or at later stage once we have more info.
Great to meet you and thanks for attending the talk. I’m good except 9-10 am ET, I don’t know how early PT you prefer so how about we meet here https://ca.meet.coop/b/wou-cyy-wpt and you pick a time, and others can hop on it they like?
We provided test server creds to Zinc and offered @Yurko’s support on API use thru the Matrix chat, if they run into issues, etc. @anaulin is point of contact via Matrix, but I imagine they have all the info for now.
Yes, what @benhylau said. The ball is in our (Zinc’s) metaphorical court, and we are working on making a proof-of-concept of the integration. I will follow up with folks as soon as we have some more progress to report. Sorry things are being slower than we intended.
)
