[kwlug-disc] Somebody needs to BBB :-)

[Richard Weait]

Hi,

Somebody needs to do something about this BigBlueButton. ;-)

I've been hearing some buzz about BigBlueButton.org.  It was featured
on Floss Weekly recently and people keep talking about it.  I missed
that episode but finally caved in and had a look at their demo.

BigBlueButton.org is conference software.  If you want to collaborate
with people in different places, this software allows you to
text-chat, voice-chat, video-chat, show a document, mark-up a
document, and share a desktop.  In whatever combination you like.  All
of this is pretty cool if you like people and want to talk to them, I
suppose.

I tried it out on their demo for about ten minutes.  Other folks
seemed to be doing the same thing at the same time, but I didn't know
them in advance.

BBB does a lot of things that I don't know about yet.  Really,
everything I've typed above is all that I know about this thing, so
far.  Except for the one thing that I learned during that ten minutes
that blew me away.

Their IRC-like chat, was automatically translating between languages
for us.  What I typed in English was translated for him to Brazilian
Portuguese.  What he typed in Brazilian Portuguese it translated into
English for me.

The future is here.  This is my flying car.

Okay, so, it F/LOSS, using something like 14 projects we know and
love.  Asterisk is in there so you can dial in to a conference from a
land-line if you like.  You can set up your server from their VM or
install yourself on Ubuntu 10.4 or something.  The tools are either
GPL or LGPL, depending.

It all runs in the browser for a user. Either on flash, or html5 if
your browser supports it.

So the test was pretty cool.  Now I want to play with BBB set up on a
private box with a good connection.

Best regards,
Richard