Mumble for everyone

[Jono Bacon]

On Fri, 2010-05-28 at 16:59 +0100, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
> And Alan, is there a single team that has all the LoCo people, or would
> that mean adding an ACL to the Mumble server for each team?

One of the benefits of IRC is that it is open to all, but that would not
scale well for Mumble. As such, I would like to recommend that we
instead focus Mumble as a replacement for conference calls; such as
team-meeting calls, and I think Ubuntu Membership will serve as a good
authentication requirement for these calls.
> 
> 
> > There are three problems I see.
> > * Recording minutes / URLs / taking votes. Some level of discipline is
> > required to take notes and record minutes of the meetings.
> >   
> 
> Good IRC meetings require minutes too, it's not enough just to have the
> log. A gobby doc and go :-)

Agreed. On a related note, I have been thinking about this recently
about how the Mumble client doesn't really scale and serve our needs.
For most conf calls it seems the following things are common:

 * People need to connect.
 * Notes need to be taken and shared.
 * More and more people are producing project status slides and sharing
them with participants; these are useful for communication progress and
recommended next steps.

It could be interesting to have a "Lernid for Mumble". Essentially a
client that provides:

 * a simple means to connect
 * a sensible listing of available rooms and attendees.
 * an embedded text editor (preferably gobby).
 * an embedded slide viewer (this can use the code in Lernid to allow
attendees to trigger slide changes to all connected participants).

I will take a look at the technology to see how viable a client would
be. If Murmer provides a library to hook into a client, it should be
pretty doable. I need to assess how much time I could commit to this
(this would be a spare-time project), but if nothing else I am happy to
commit to providing a design to help drive direction.

> > Alternatively someone could record/archive the audio conversation.
> > Potential legal issues recording people? (I don't know)

We would need to make it clear on startup and docs that this is a
possible risk and people should disconnect if they feel uncomfortable
with this.

> > * Accessibility. Kinda goes along with the previous point, but if
> > there are deaf/mute people in the group then their needs need to be
> > catered for.
> >   
> 
> They'll have to avoid vox then. But that's no reason for us to deprecate
> vox.

Agreed.

> > * Technology issues. Often people can spend ages getting their audio
> > working, wasting time in a meeting. People join and sound like a cylon
> > or darth vader, which can disrupt the flow also. With IRC it's easy to
> > ignore people arriving/leaving, not so easy when they bring with them
> > a heap of background noise or broken audio.
> >   
> 
> There's typically a one-time setup cost. But because people start using
> it all day, it quickly becomes a solved problem.

Also agreed.

	Jono

-- 
Jono Bacon
Ubuntu Community Manager
www.ubuntu.com / www.jonobacon.org
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