--- Dabreegster IRCUser <dabreegster at gmail.com> wrote:
> The idea of providing a live ASCII-art stream could
> work. Talking at
> the same time would be ideal, but the only
> connection available to me
> is dialup.
>
> I doubt any sort of realtime voice chat
> would be an option
> for me.

I don't think two-way chat would be ideal. I attend
lots of conference calls as part of my job and I can
verify that it can lead to very confusing
conversations when you have too many people speaking
at once. I think it would work much better to have
one-way voice chat, or "broadcast", to the
participants. Questions for the presenter can be
handled via IRC. This is how most Internet based
presentations for a large audience is handled.

I can remember using voice chat over dial-up, way back
in the day. Quality wasn't great, but it worked. The
only other traffic would be text data through a ssh
channel. Your voice traffic could go to a central
server that would one-way broadcast to the
participants. Not having to handle two-way voice
traffic would help with your bandwidth. I'm just not
sure of the best tools/methods to do this.

An idea just occurred to me: is there a
free/very-cheap voice conferencing service out there?
Dabreegster, do you have a cell phone? If the answer
is yes to both, then that would solve the problem.

> In addition, I lack a working microphone.

That can easily be rectified. I'm sure I have a PC
somewhere in my box of junk. If not, I'll bet someone
else on the mailing list has one they are willing to
give to you.

> The discussion bit
> of the meeting could be hosted in the IRC channel,

Sure, if voice chat is not an option. In fact, if the
audience was large, it would probably work best to
have questions posted via the IRC channel, so the
presenter's voice wouldn't be interrupted.

> and I could
> demonstrate things through screen at the same time.
> Is this OK with
> everybody? Are there better ideas?

We also need is a server where people could connect to
for the presentation. I was thinking of using some
Linux Live CD distro with just an ssh server running
to minimize the security risks. Then, we would just
need a list of participants and their email addresses
to send them their username/passwords and event
information. We could also use the #brlug IRC channel
for questions and chat during the presentation.

John

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