BigBlueButton hosted by the The Online Meeting Co-operative

[chrisc]

Yesterday the Online Meeting Co-operative agreed to host the first meet.coop server with Koumbit co-operative in Montreal, Canada .

We are using Ansible to configure the server and the GPL’d code is hosted in GitLab repos on git.coop, we don’t yet have a service up and running but are aiming to for the Open2020 event on 11-12th June.

The co-operative is at an early stage and is open for other to get involved, we would be happy for some Librehosters to join, see the wiki for some more information including about membership and our roadmap plus the Online Meeting Co-operative open Discourse forum:

The meet.coop Forum

[chrisc]

If the alpha stage of this project goes well what are the co-operative hosting options in Europe we can explore for the beta stage of the project? @juh this might be something we could explore the possibility of working together on?

[juh]

Yes, of course!

Currently we provide dedicated BBB servers to meet the data protection requirements of our customers, members.

Your idea is to have an eu.meet.coop entry to a balanced BBB service with a lot of servers in different locations of the EU?

Do the users of this service have to be members of the coop or do you want to set up a free service as in free beer?

I am very much in favor of the membership model. Funding from a third party gives users the impression that quality services are for free which they are not.

[chrisc]

@juh

Your idea is to have an eu.meet.coop entry to a balanced BBB service with a lot of servers in different locations of the EU?

Perhaps, no plans are set in stone, I posted some more thoughts here:

Based on my reading of the Scalelite documentation it is designed to be a front facing service for several back end BBB servers all in the same data centre as the backend servers all have the same network mount for the saved videos (for example using NFS). Of course it might be possible to configure it to use something like Syncthing to replicate files between servers or perhaps Hadoop, however we might want to give people a choice of which physical location to host their meeting in and I don’t believe that Scalelite is designed for this, it is more about automatically selecting servers by load / usage.

@juh

Do the users of this service have to be members of the coop or do you want to set up a free service as in free beer?

I am very much in favor of the membership model. Funding from a third party gives users the impression that quality services are for free which they are not.

Again we haven’t fully worked this out, but yes, I expect so, I’m in agreement with you on this question.