Mumble for everyone

[Mark Shuttleworth]

Hi folks

We've recently got Mumble up and running for folks at Canonical. It's
proving to be a popular way to get groups talking to one another. Think
of Mumble as "IRC for voice": you sign in to the Mumble server just like
an IRC server, then there are a bunch of rooms which are like IRC
channels, and when you join a channel you "hear" everyone else on the
channel. Most usefully, you can see who's speaking. So it's much better
than a conf call, and is free software.

I'd like to figure out how to test the usefulness of Mumble in the wider
Ubuntu community.

As a straw man, how would you feel if we broght up a mumble server just
for Ubuntu Members? We can do access control based on LP team
membership, and that's our biggest, most inclusive team. On the upside,
it's a useful crowd to test with, they all "get" Ubuntu and we know they
all make a big contribution to Ubuntu. On the downside, it would still
exclude lots of other people who make a large part of the Ubuntu magic
happen.

I'm reluctant to throw open the floodgates and have an open Mumble
server. We don't know how it scales, we don't know how it behaves under
different traffic conditions, and we don't know if it would attract
abuse. I'd like to do some more controlled rollouts.

Suggestions?
Mark