Hi everybody,
when announcing today's leadership meeting on IRC I got some replies to the tune of "oh no, Google!" as the meeting minutes are recorded on Google Docs and the meeting itself is held using Google Meet.
Note that both are set up to be usable without a Google account, so the impact on users should be limited.
That said, if that's a real concern that prevents people from participating who otherwise would like to chime in, we need a solution. To avoid spending too much time on something that may not actually be a problem, I'm asking you:
1. To consider if you care about the leadership meeting (otherwise, please don't create extra work to prove a point about "big tech", software licenses or whatever) 2. If using these two tools for this specific purpose is a problem for you 3. What your ideal alternative solution would look like 4. How your solution would be implemented 5. Present the result of 4 to the list :-)
Note that this project, its developers, contributors and maintainers aren't in the business of managing servers or communication suites (although we spend a fair amount of time and money on running coreboot.org to ensure people can contribute with little restrictions: apart from that meeting, everything we do is self-hosted!) so a proposal should be low maintenance for us.
This means: running the meeting must not be a hassle (we tried a fair amount of open tools for running the calls: jitsi, mumble and several others, and they fell flat, for example because they sent video streams from everybody to everybody. n^2 traffic growth isn't great), available for the long term (if you offer to run the necessary services for us that's nice, but we'd prefer not to have to change routines again 3 months down the road because your priorities shifted, so any such offer should give us the impression that it's available for the foreseeable future) and not just exchanging one "troublesome" vendor for another (I guess we'll see what "troublesome" means to people in the community.)
As for capacity: The meetings take one hour every 14 days. Today's meeting had 17 participants and I think some meetings had a few more folks joining. Those are discussions not presentations, so high-latency streaming options (such as PeerTube's new live stream feature) won't work.
Thanks, Patrick