[Freedombox-discuss] Request for Comments: Agenda Items for 2020 Summit

[hjenkins]

> For the record, I said that _Jitsi Meet_ requirements are too 
> demanding.
> 
> Other multiperson videoconference hosting exist, including janus which 
> is both light on resource demands and already packaged for Debian.

Thanks to Jonas Smedegaard for the correction. Given the CO2 footprint 
of videoconferencing, there are plenty of reasons for avoiding 
resource-hungry implementations.

Personally I don't really care if the call needs to be scheduled or not; 
I can easily accomodate either socially. Installing an app is also fine, 
as long as it has good cross-platform support. The ability to do >2-way 
calls is important. Being able to downgrade and fail gracefully with a 
good error message is important, and fallback to voice-only or even 
text-only is also good.

Forming subgroups easily seems important. Tawk.space has a drag-and-drop 
interface, where you drag your own camera view into the subgroup you 
want to converse with. Roomler has a room-hierachy. Avatar position 
seems a de-facto subgrouping UI (given all the social meet-ups in games 
with voice channels and 3-D avatars which cannot really display any 
expressions). This could be stripped down to a 2-D floorplan of virtual 
rooms with Mumble (https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Pluginguide); a 
virtual-workplace "game", with a "game map" that looks something like 
the Marauder's Map in Harry Potter.

Education and conferences are common use cases. edumeet 
(=multiparty-meeting, I think, https://edumeet.org/technical-overview/) 
is designed for talks and lectures, with screenshare/slideshow and 
channels for asking the lecturer questions (likewise some others more 
resource-heavy). Jangouts also does screensharing. With Jangouts on a 
Raspberry Pi, it seems connection bandwidth is often the limiting 
factor, anyway (at ~45 KiB/s per, the Raspberry Pi 3 B can handle ~50 
encrypted audiovideo streams). 
https://www.raspberry-pi-geek.com/Archive/2017/22/Open-and-secure-videoconferencing-with-Jangouts