[FOSDEM] virtual presence "stands" on FOSDEM

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On 12/5/20, Kristoff <kristoff at skypro.be> wrote:

> I do not think that we need to things to complicated and I surely do not
> want to burden FOSDEM to much for this.

ah you may have misunderstood.  i raised the idea of different
presentation systems (3D versions of "forums") with a view to
encouraging *participants* to contribute, not to expect FOSDEM
volunteer organisers to do everything.

alasdair then followed up by explaining that exactly this sort of
thing had been anticipated, and back-end APIs had been designed that
could be used by any such portal, whether 2D or 3D, web-based or
app-based.

the fact that the very first hit for a 3D online forum had the exact
same idea, that plugins would work with backend APIs, this is just
funny and a coincidence / convergence.

however: i stress one critical thing from some rather s*** experiences
with online conferences (and one fantastic one, XDC2020) over the past
6 months:

      multiple redundant paths and gateways to chat, video, audio and
content are CRITICAL to successfully being able to keep participants
and speakers in constant real-time contact.

in the case of XDC2020 this was achieved with jitsi servers gatewayed
into youtube-live, all talks were pre-recorded, the Intel sponsors
stunningly kindly offered all speakers grants to upgrade their
internet connectivity and provide decent microphones, and last resort
took telephone numbers in case of internet failure so that Q&A during
talks could be done over the phone.

with sponsorship from Jitsi themselves and/or freeconferencecalls.com
it may be possible to gateway VoIP and SIP into the FOSDEM jitsi
servers, if that has not already been organised.




therefore, kristoff, i was NOT saying "do the most complex looking
thing" i was saying "do ALL of them" and that's the beauty of the APIs
that alasdair says have been designed.

FOSS individuals are slightly different from your average business
user who doesn't care or know in the slightest about privacy,
security, TOR, cookies and tracking.

FOSS individuals actually read and review and do not agree to slack,
wechat or discord terms and conditions: they run with javascript
DISABLED, not just cookies blocked, and route through TOR and other
anonymising services.

some of them will actually check if there are patents on the audio and
video streams coming from a site, and if there are any will refuse,
out of principle, to watch your video or listen to what your business
has to say.

consequently you need to take this into account when designing your
"stand" landing page.


you may no doubt already be aware of all of this: i am simply laying
it all out so that the context is clear for everyone, and we do not
have suggestions, "hey everyone how about making slack the default
exclusive gateway for all FOSDEM participants including speakers" as
was done for OpenPOWER NA 2020 for example.



> As I see it, our main issue this year is to attract visitors to whatever
> online event we organise.

indeed.  and thus the domain name fosdem.org becomes the key gateway there.

>
> So, this means
>
> - a presence on the FOSDEM website. (either on the site itself, or just
> a link to a website on our servers)

indeed.  all under the fosdem.org domain.  other such schemes snipped,
they are respectable reasonable ideas worthy of merit


> This would allow us to attract both 'targetted' visitors and more
> random-people 'walking by', so If this would be possible, this would be
> more then sufficient for us.

agreed

>
>  From our side.
> We will look into preparing a number of videos to put on some
> video-platform,

do bear in mind what i said about the encoding format.  ogg vorbis
flac dirac theora are your friends.

disregard that and you will find that key strategic FOSS developers
walk away, and because they are using TOR, JS, cookie and adblocking,
you have no idea that they even came to your site.


> and do some presentations and demos on jitsi; but we can
> all organise that by ourself so we do not need to bother the FOSDEM
> volunteers with that.

indeed.  however, see end below: it would not be unreasonable to
somehow gateway those via the fosdem domain (caveat: who writes that
code)


now, how can i put this best.  can i check with you if there is a
possible assumption that you *might* have made?

the assumption that i feel you might have made is that just because
the fosdem.org domain is controlled by the team, it is *only* that
team that must do the work in developing the website source code
*behind* that domain.

was that unspoken assumption foremost in your mind when you wrote the
(really good) ideas above?

the reason that i ask is because (and i have not checked here) i would
expect the entirety of the fosdem website source code to itself be a
libre project (is this the case, and if so where is it?)

consequently, with a little coordination and double-checking, *your
company* might actually be in a position to implement the very simple
and straightforward features that you expect to have... *and they run
on fosdem.org servers* rather than being off-site, isolated, and hard
for visitors to find.

not, and i apologise if this was not your intent or implication,
"expect the fosdem team to write it for you" which of course noone
would not expect anyone to say.

obviously the team have the final say in what actually runs however
this is less work than designing and doing security review which
others can help volunteer with.


so this is, i believe, what alasdair was inviting people to do:
contact the email address he gave and volunteer to suggest ideas and
help enhance the source code behind the fosdem.org domain, not just
for your benefit but for other sponsors and stand holders, and for
your own benefit in future fosdem events as well.

make sense?

l.