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→WebRTC with BigBlueButton
==WebRTC with BigBlueButton==
Just before lunch I watched a very interesting presentation on WebRTC in BigBlueButton. I had not heard about WebRTC in the past, but I had heard about BigBlueButton because I am currently taking an online class where we used this software to have an online class discussion, so I was really interested in learning more about it. Since the presenter couldn’t make it, he gave the entire presentation through the BigBlueButton software using Chad, who is in student who works on this project in cdot to communicate questions people had for him. I thought this was a great way to do this presentation because it really showed how great and useful this software really is. The presenter was Fred Dixon, who was the product manager for BigBlueButton and his mission for this software was that everyone should be able to use high quality software for online learning.
Once the presentation got started we could see Fred on his webcam and he could see all of us through the webcam setup in the room. He showed us how he could display a slideshow to us and mark it up to present more stuff to us. He explained that this software could be setup by anyone for free on their own server. He said that at this point they only suggest that you host a group of 25 or less just because they know people don’t read instructions so based on current hardware most people have to day that would be an ideal number to not have any issues with. He explained how the programs front end is flash based because that’s what webcams work best with. He then explained how the program records the video and the audio from the entire session and that was possible due to two open source projects that were red5 and FreeSwitch. Red5 was used for the video and FreeSwitch was used for the audio.
Fred then provided us with some details about the community behind BigBlueButton. He mentioned that there were 1527 forks on github and counting of people contributing to BigBlueButton. He said that there were over 1500 people currently on the mailing list for the projects and he was very happy with that. We learned that the project won at Mozilla Ignite and was featured on The White House Blog. It also won the best open source project of 2013. He then provided us with some details about companies currently using this software. There is a company called VirtualWag that uses BigBlueButton to provide 1 on 1 dog training to people from home, which I thought was amazing and wouldn’t have thought this software would be used like that. He then told us about future plans to make the software all HTML 5 based and include Ipad support. He explained that the UI needed improving, specifically for people with more than 1 audio device plugged in. He mentioned that WebRTC was the peer-to-peer protocol that allowed all of this to be possible, but didn’t elaborate too much on it.
Overall, this was a really great and interesting presentation to see. I think the fact that the speaker couldn’t make the presentation in person and did the whole thing using BigBlueButton made the whole presentation better. I really got the sense that Fred was very big on open source. He had even made some jokes about the software not costing any many that were pretty funny. I felt like he wanted more people to contribute if they liked what they saw. He mentioned how some people want to help, but don’t end up contributing and some do. I got the sense since he mentioned that two open source technologies were responsible for this whole project that he was really into everything being open source and thought that more things should be. He made a point that he worked at another company and at the company when they worked on a project and released software everything had to work completely perfect before it could be released. Since this project was entirely open source he said the software could be released with the features they believed people wanted most and then add on features later. I believe he was implying that open source give you a lot more freedom compared to these closed source projects.
==Other Presentations==