86 lines
4.1 KiB
Markdown
86 lines
4.1 KiB
Markdown
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title = "Running online events with Open Source communication tools"
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aliases = ["/docs/guides/running-online-events"]
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Starting in 2020, Team Matrix planned to start running regular meetup events,
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with speakers, talks, Q+A, beer, pizza etc.
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We hosted one, in London, in February. Around that time and immediately
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afterward, much of the world shut down due to a global pandemic, and hosting
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in-person meetups became infeasible.
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Rather than drop the idea, we decided to make use of the technologies we
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regularly promote to host a *virtual* meetup event. The idea being to try to
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recreate the fun and atmosphere of a real meetup in a decentralised way.
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The resulting event, when viewed in directly in Element, appears as below, or
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[watch the full recording](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APVp-20ATLk).
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## Use Jitsi for Video
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It's important to us, wherever possible, to use open tools. Jitsi Meet is an
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open-source, self-hostable video conferencing platform.
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[Installing Jitsi is a much-documented experience](https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/blob/master/doc/quick-install.md) that I won't delve into here, but for our purpose we used our
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installation at <https://jitsi.modular.im>.
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First, we want to get our speakers all connected. To do this, we created a new
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room on Jitsi (the name doesn't matter), and made sure to add a password, since
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this is not the default. All the speakers for the session will connect to this
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room.
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Next, we configured the Jitsi Meet server to stream to YouTube, and also made
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the stream available directly via a video control on https://stream.matrix.org.
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Note that we did not make the call itself available for the entire audience to
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join - this would likely have been a impossible moderation task, and would not
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have added to the experience.
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## Configuring the Live stream
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Jitsi itself comes with the ability to stream to YouTube, but only YouTube, through the
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[Jibri](https://github.com/jitsi/jibri) component. An open-source
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alternative is to capture the jitsi meet screen and broadcast it as a video stream using
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[OBS](https://obsproject.com/) to capture the screen.
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For the streaming server, one option is to use the
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[nginx RTMP plugin](https://github.com/sergey-dryabzhinsky/nginx-rtmp-module) set up to receive a stream
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via RTMP and then convert this into an HLS stream for viewing on the web. This can also relay
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the stream to another RTMP server so you can make the stream available on another platform
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like YouTube.
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When you start streaming to your RTMP server, it will create a playlist file. Some players
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and browsers support this natively, but to make it playable in any web browser, you'll need
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to use a [Javascript player like Google's shaka player](https://github.com/google/shaka-player).
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This gets your stream up and running, but if you are expecting a larger audience you can also
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look at putting caching web servers in front of the nginx to cache the media (*.ts) files.
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## Use Matrix for live chat
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We created a dedicated "watching" matrix room, where users could join to talk
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to each other about the streamed presentations. They can also talk to each
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other more generally about the topics - or about anything else. We were pleased
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to see conversations flowing, since these "unofficial" exchanges are a big part
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of in-person meetups we wanted to recreate.
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The other thing the viewers can do in the room is ask questions of the
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speakers. To do this, the host pulls questions out of the room, and collects
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them ready to ask the presenter. In our event, we waited until the end of the
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presentations, but a host could choose to interrupt the speaker to ask.
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With a dedicated room created, it's possible to add a widget to the room
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containing only the video embed. To do this, make a page (like
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<https://stream.matrix.org>) which contains ONLY the video, then create a
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new custom widget in the matrix room in Element.
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