Should we start a freenode channel instead of using Google Hangouts for calls?

It may go without saying that IRC is good for text-based chat. Hangouts seems more geared towards video conferencing, so a Hangouts alternative might have some sort of real-time audio/video/screen sharing capabilities.

There are a couple of good options for real-time audio/video conferencing in the open-source community:

• Jitsi Meet (e.g. https://meet.jit.si/social.coop )
• Rocket.Chat (more of a Slack alternative, but has IRC integration as well as video/audio/file sharing/screen sharing)
• appear.in (e.g. https://appear.in/social.coop )

What do you propose are the benefits to video and audio capability. It seems like it would take a lot more work and resources to store records. Also, not everyone thinks it is worth investing in a web cam, and some people like myself have a reason to avoid unnecessary exposure. Just my two cents.

What do you propose are the benefits to video and audio capability. It seems like it would take a lot more work and resources to store records
- we only store text-based relations of what was said during each meeting as recording video and audio streams would definitely be overkill

I was just offering those examples, since the thread was about options for a Google Hangouts alternative.

I would suggest http://Matrix.org (which is basically next-gen IRC).

We already have a #SocialCoop room you can join, download the Riot app or on the web at https://riot.im/app/#/room/#SocialCoop:matrix.org

It support audio/video calls, and we could eventually set up our own Social.coop Matrix node :)

Mayel, thank you once again for sharing your expertise. I'm definitely going to join the matrix channel and check it out.

From my perspective, synchronous verbal meetings allow for a different type of flow of information and focused attention from text-based communication that tracks working together in person in a way that allows for the development of specific types of efficiencies, trust, and working relationships.

As a globally distributed group, we need our baseline infrastructure to be asynchronous and text based, so the purpose of these calls is to supplement that with the opportunity to work as a group while hearing each others' voices. With the core infrastructure asynchronous, nobody needs to feel that they have to engage along this vector to be empowered w/i the organization, but it adds an additional space for engagement.

As to @brylie's suggested platforms, I think it would be great to discuss such options during the meta part of the call. I'm a pragmatist when it comes to FOSS stuff - if it is easy to implement for folks with limited tech literacy and there is someone willing to do the work of setting it up, I'm all for preferencing it over using the infrastructure of the companies we ultimately want to supplant. OTOH, I've been in too many situations where platform purism has made projects inaccessible to a portion of supporters, thus stalling them out, so I tend to not want to go into using them without careful consideration of the pros and cons.

So, my intention is to go ahead with the first call as planned on the Google Hangouts, and then discuss what we would like to use going forward then.

I'm glad we have a Matrix channel and will definitely hang out there! The Riot interface really is super-friendly.

IRC is great but not very friendly to folks who haven't grown up with it. Note it's possible to bridge Matrix->IRC (which I'm doing with the #lib.reviews channel on FreeNode) but I would only advise that if we have a large percentage of IRC users.

It's worth noting that it's possible to do synchronous real-time meetings in text-based chat, capturing minutes, decisions, etc. Debian and Wikimedia use MeetBot ( https://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot ) to facilitate this. That said, face-to-face can be nice to build group coherence -- human brains have a lot of hardware just to deal with faces/voices :)

There are a couple of open source video conferencing solutions. They are probably a pain to set up and it might be the kind of thing we spend some $$$ from the social.coop budget on down the road. I suggest periodically re-examining our use of proprietary software with an eye to implementing user-friendly open alternatives.

yeah, matrix seems cool, and there's much more people in the channel than yesterday :)

I just sat in on a W3C Social group conf call. They use mumble for audio, IRC for chat, and there is a bot called Zakim in the IRC channel that manages queueing to talk. https://www.w3.org/2001/12/zakim-irc-bot

Pretty effective.

My vote is for Matrix. Having to run 2 or 3 apps is not something most people would like to do.

I just found out about this: https://nextcloud.com/talk/ (Git page: https://github.com/nextcloud/spreed ) which looks like a perfect drop-in replacement for hangouts, with audio, video and chat functionalities all in one place.

@mayel @victormatekole what's your take on this?

Looks cool and worth trying, but I feel like Jitsi is our best bet at the moment. Yes, webRTC theoretically makes it simple to create a comms app in the browser these days, but especially for group chat, it's more complicated than that (well tweaked relay servers, etc), especially if you want good quality and not to turn each caller's CPU to 150%....

Or we could decide to stick to audio calls, and then Mumble within Riot/Matrix is top-notch.

Agreed, sticking to audio calls would make everything simpler