Minutes from BigBlueButton committers meeting 2012-05-18

[Fred Dixon]

Hi Everyone,

As we wind down on BigBlueButton 0.8, we're starting to plan out BigBlueButton 0.81.   Our desire is to get a beta release of 0.81 out before end of July, with the intent to  have an updated version ready for the fall school term.  

As we've said many times in the past, we put stability and usability ahead of features.  Let us state upfront that if 0.81 shows any signs of reducing the stability and usability, we will continue to work on it until its ready.

Please consider the following plans as DRAFT, and we welcome your feedback on our plans as we near the finish of 0.8 (soon, soon!)


Attended:
       Fred Dixon
       Richard Alam
       Marco Calderon

Absent:
       Felipe Cecagno
       Jeremy Thomerson
       Tiago Jacobs

       Denis Zgonjanin

Recording:

       http://bit.ly/JnUmTt

We held the meeting in using BigBlueButton (of course!), so you can hear the full discussion in the above URL.  Here's are the notes from the meeting:

1. Review of BigBlueButton 0.8 development process

The summary is we always want to do shorter iterations, but we're not willing to sacrifice the quality of the release to achieve it.  We all laughed when I put up a slide that showed we had originally planned to release BigBlueButton 0.8 in October, 2011.  Looking back at the work we've done since then, I think this sentiment reflects that we are optimists by heart, but pragmatics by trade.

We did get a *lot* of great testing from the community for this release, and it certainly contributed towards to stability and usability of the final product.

2.  For 0.8, we have two key features that we want to get in are

(a)  Support for Students with Disabilities

(b)  Capture and playback of all events that occur within the presentation area

Support for students with disabilities (a) is very important to our target market, and we want to make sure we address their needs.  For (b), this will involve making sure that BigBlueButton server captures all the events -- whiteboard, pan/zoom, and cursor -- and that the post-processing scripts can create an HTML5 playback (using popcorn.js) that plays back all the activity.

While not discussed in the meeting per-se, we want to add that we'll be merging in the great work that Seneca Collage did on creating a polling module for BigBlueButton.

4.  Support for HTML5

Our plan for HTML5 support is in three phases

   (a) playback of a recording in HTML5 (done in 0.8)

   (b) view a BigBlueButton session in HTML5 client

   (c) two-way participation (transmit voice and video) to BigBlueButton session in HTML5 client

We're starting to explore how we can achieve (b).  We can definitely see the shift towards HTML5, but we also realize that full two-way participation (c) is only possible with WebRTC, which is not yet finished and only Chrome and FireFox are supporting it.  

We think that (b) is a good next step, as we can create a very light-weight and simple client that will let users see the presentation (we'll re-use the same code for playback of the presentation area in popcorn.js), interact with chat (we can do that two way), and see and hear the presenter (we'll stream it down to the client).

We'll be updating the BigBlueButton Labs wiki pages with our thoughts of how to implement (b).  

4.  Update on efforts to setup a not-for-profit BigBlueButton Inc (like the Eclipse Foundation)

We believe that all successful open source projects have formal organization to accelerate the development and support the community.   We think Eclipse is a great example and we're working towards getting enough momentum behind a BigBlueButton Inc. to formally launch it.    This is partly why we're putting so much effort into the quality of the software as we want to see other commerical companies integrate BigBlueButton into their product or service offering.  For that to occur, BigBlueButton needs to be rock solid.

5.  Nomination for including Gustavo Salazar as a committer

Gustavo Salazar (Guga) has worked with Richard for over a year working on BigBlueButton, primarily assisting Richard in the design and implementation of the record and playback architecture.  He has been the lead developer on Matterhorn integration, and has fixed 12 bugs in the past year

    http://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton/issues/list?can=1&q=owner:guga.salazar.loor%20status=Fixed 

Guga is employed by Blindside Networks, the company that started the BigBlueButton project.  Fred, Richard, and Marcos also work for Blindside Networks.   The other committers work for other companies.  We're all entrepreneurs who believe in the social benefit and entrepreneurial opportunities around BigBlueButton.  

We still have to finish 0.8, but the above gives you snapshot for our current thoughts for the direction of the project for the next few months.  

Feedback welcome.

Regards,... Fred

--
BigBlueButton Developer
http://bigbluebutton.org/
http://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton
BigBlueButton on twitter: @bigbluebutton