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
On Wed, Jan 13, 2021 at 10:37:14PM +0100, Patrick Georgi wrote:
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.
It's good of you to ask about this.
For archival purposes, accessibility, minimising lock-in, & to benefit from a familiar collaboration workflow, it would be best to for minutes to be kept as plain text (Markdown, Org, or another lightweight markup language) in a Git repo. So, ideally: export the existing Google Docs, use Pandoc or similar to turn them into the lightweight ML of choice, put that in Git, & avoid Google Docs thereafter.
Failing that, if you do stick with Google Docs, please could you at least ensure that any published links to the minutes are to the "web page" version, not the default version, so that they are accessible and archivable? If you could fix the existing links in the .ics file too, so that those documents become accessible, that would be good.
(If you aren't sure what I mean by the "web page" version, here is an explanation. Last time I checked -a couple of years ago - there were two ways to "publish" Google Docs:
- As a link to the editing interface, which requires the user to have a JavaScript-enabled browser and to not have certain kinds of disabily. Docs publishes this way are impossible to view/retrieve for users browsing with Lynx, w3m, wget, etc, or with some accessibility issues.
For me and some other people I know, this interface is unreadable. Unfortunately, the links in Coreboot's .ics file go to this interface, which means I can't read the minutes.
- As "web pages". This doesn't have those requirements, and is much more accessible. IIRC: File > Publish to the web > Publish.
Doing that ought to give you a URL you can share that should work for everybody.)
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. [And not exponential connection problems like Jitsi.]
That being so, I don't have any suggested video chat solutions, sorry. Maybe Jami, but I haven't tried it. Might have the same problems as Jitsi. Anyway, I wouldn't be joining the video chat... ;)
Anyway, thanks again for asking about this,
Sam
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Patrick Georgi -
Sam Kuper