[okfn-discuss] Free Software tools for OKFN -- please contribute

Fri Nov 29 19:30:29 UTC 2013

Hi Stefano,

On 29 Nov 2013, at 18:44, Stefano Costa <stefano.costa at okfn.org> wrote:
> Audio/video conferencing. In my experience this is a major component
> for community building and organisational purposes, that the OKF is
> using a lot, with good results.
> 
> 1. Is using Google Hangouts and Skype acceptable?

We encountered this problem with doing the video interviews for the Redecentralize project (redecentralize.org) and ended up stuck on Hangouts :( Although we did spend some time looking at WebRTC to see whether it could help us - it couldn’t because everyone is too busy arguing about codecs rather than implementing the MediaRecorder API. 

Are they acceptable? One is owned and run by Google, the other by Microsoft. Neither are open source. Skype is known to be prone to eavesdropping (by Microsoft) after once claiming end to end encryption - http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/think-your-skype-messages-get-end-to-end-encryption-think-again/ 

> 2. Can we set up a WebRTC service that is reliable (i.e. is able to
> serve a conference call with the same number of participants as we
> currently have)?

It’s entirely possible to use WebRTC today (at least with Chrome and Firefox), but there is a fair amount of infrastructure that is needed. It’s easier to host lots of audio calls than lots of video though.

You'd need:

- A signalling server to handle ‘rooms’ - this can be custom, or XMPP based, isn’t technically part of WebRTC.
- A STUN server for initially establishing connections (most demos use Google’s public server) which tells each client what their public IP address is
- A TURN server if any users are behind symmetric NATs which routes all of the traffic through that server instead of going direct P2P.
- An app to glue it all together.

There are a couple of open STUN servers (https://code.google.com/p/rfc5766-turn-server/ also handles TURN) and there are a few libraries already available (such as http://simplewebrtc.com/ which powers https://talky.io/) with which to build the app. I don’t know of any out of the box solutions that you can just install on a server, possibly because of the extra servers and setup required.

Perhaps OKF have a spare server somewhere where most of this could be installed? Unless routing users through a TURN server it doesn’t need a lot of bandwidth. Oh, and some developers to implement the app ;) Perhaps this should be a labs project?

For small meetings, talky.io is nice and requires only that you know the URL.

Ross.
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