Re: Advice for online events

[Ian Kelling]

Ark <cloudneozero@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi list!
>
> I belong to a science group at my university. We promote science and
> critical thinking by doing events with experts about different topics. We
> try to get science to the people.
>
> Our public activities have stopped due to the pandemics. We're considering
> doing them online. We have community principles and we're trying to adopt
> libre software (we're spanish speakers). Right now our site uses mezzanine,
> a free python CMS and it's using Debian 10 as its OS. We have mailman3 as
> our email communication tool and we've been using Jitsi Meet for our
> internal coordination meetings. Sadly, we don't have the resources to have
> our own hardware infrastructure so we use a VPS in digitalocean.
>
> Our events are small. The most popular one has, at most, 60 attendants. The
> average is between 25 and 30 people. The experts talk for a while (around
> 45 to 60 minutes) and then the participants can intervene. We'd like to
> allow them to talk by microphone, only in the second part.  We're not sure
> how many people we'll have when we go online, but we want to use free
> software as much as we can. By reading this mailing list, I think that for
> an open talk with only a couple of people (the experts and the moderator)
> the best bet is BigBlueButton. As it's a tool aimed at education, it seems
> to provide good tools for our purpose.
>
> I'm writing to the list to obtain guidance. First, ¿is there a more
> recommended VPS, or an alternative?. We really don't have the resources for
> our own machines and the university is in no position right now to provide
> them (the talks were made in company with the library, but they don't have
> the resources either). DigitalOcean has a problem; if we turn off the
> machines they still charge us. We can pay for a machine with the
> requirements for BBB, only by the hour, and only the big names like AWS,
> GCC or Azure seem to charge like that. We want to avoid especially those
> big companies.

Create a script to setup the machine. Delete it and recreate it as needed.

bitfolk.com seems to be a relatively freedom respecting vps provider,
but they don't do the power off no charge thing either. If you automate
it, you also get away from digitalocean's nonfree javascript interface
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.en.html

>
> Second of all, is there an alternative for live streaming with free
> software?. The common answer in Jitsi lists when there are many
> participants is using Youtube, but we don't want to use Google. If they're
> the only option, we'd rather not live stream.

At FSF we used gstreamer + icecast, you could use that, it worked well. See
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/how-to-livestream-a-conference-in-just-under-a-week

>
> Thanks for any suggestion. We owe a lot to the free software community,
> especially in these times.

Good luck

-- 
Ian Kelling | Senior Systems Administrator, Free Software Foundation
GPG Key: B125 F60B 7B28 7FF6 A2B7  DF8F 170A F0E2 9542 95DF
https://fsf.org | https://gnu.org