Hi Brent and friends -- Wikiversity's campus radio is an inspiring project. I would love to see a FLOSS VOIP solution in place for WikiEdcuator and it would really be cool if we could see who was online to connect for a chat. In terms of prioritisation -- I think WE need to focus on the phase 2 hosting and fail over solution before finding a VOIP solution :-(.
Given that we have a small but very dedicated team of techie volunteers -- I think that it's prudent for us to minimize maintenance and upstream dependencies for the time being. Pretty soon -- I'm sure that our number of community techie volunteers will grow -- especially given the flavour and interest in FLOSS discussions on the list these past days <smile>. In many respects -- WE is a community of association that adheres to our values around the free cultural works definition. Consequently -- on the server side we cannot host or implement any non-free software. At times its tough -- for example Google analytics has some cool features to help us analyse data -- but I don't think that it would be appropriate for our community to install these technologies on our server. WE has benefited tremendously from free software in being able to build a global project with minimal technical infrastructure costs. I think we owe it to ourselves to say "thank you" by continuing our commitment to the values of the free software movement. At the same time, I do think it's important to encourage and respect individual choices around the tools WikiEducators use on their desktops -- as long as all the server stuff uses OSS and free formats. I also understand that there are legitimate reasons why many WE's may not be able to use free software, for example where corporate or institutional policy does not permit users to download software on their machines. At a personal level -- I try my best to accommodate the diversity of our community. If someone wants to "skype" or "gizmo" with me , or invites me to participate in an Elluminate session -- I'll do my best even if it means I must go next door an use a Window's box :-(. My sense is that all of us go out of our way to accommodate other WikiEducators -- I think our tolerance and respect for others is a virtue of our community. Getting back to Webpresent -- I still rather attracted to the work being done with Webpresent -- I've been trying for 2 years to figure out a way to support and integrate slide show presentations in our project. I think Webpresent shows considerable promise, and to the best of my knowledge is the first of its kind in the Open Source arena. What I like about Webpresent is the fact that the source files are available in free file formats (and they are planning to run server side conversions into free formats). In addition, if you like, you can host a web conference -- not as a substitute for VOIP but a technology to conference using slideshows, whiteboards etc, I see this collaboration as a hosted service with our free software friends at the University of the Western Cape. It shouldn't be too hard to incorporate an extension to embed the third party slide show in a WikiEducator page. Its still early days and the technology is still under development -- so we have lots of time to think about this. Appreciate all the thoughts and considerations around software alternatives - -as well as the advice on recording screen movies on GNU/Linux. Cheers Wayne On Fri, 2008-06-06 at 22:57 +1200, Brent wrote: > i really liked the test we did on Wikiversity with Asterisk + > Moziax ... but unfortunately no spare boxes laying around, and > incredibly expensive bandwidth costs in NZ. From some earlier research > i seem to remember that there was actually a full Asterisk + debian > (perhaps) distro that could be downloaded and installed ... so how > hard could it be really. We could get in touch with the Wikiversity > guys who did the original experiments; see: > http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wiki_Campus_Radio they had for a long > time wanted to do some tests with Wikieducator as one of the > "programs". > > Gizmo itself is not open source, but it at least uses an open protocol > in SIP ... so there's half the battle. > > brent. > > > On Fri, Jun 6, 2008 at 9:11 PM, Chris Harvey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: > > Using Gizmo is another alternative, and someone else > maintains the > infrastructure for us. :-) > > > > > No its not > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gizmo_Project > > We used Asterisk and moziax on wikiversity, I think it is a > good idea. > Its easy to setup, maybe Brent has a spare box lying around we > could use. > > http://moziax.mozdev.org/ > > > > > > On Fri, Jun 6, 2008 at 5:35 PM, Jim Tittsler > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > On Fri, Jun 6, 2008 at 6:37 PM, Chris Harvey > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I think WE should set up asterisk so people can talk > to each other. > > > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterisk > > > > Using Gizmo is another alternative, and someone else > maintains the > infrastructure for us. :-) > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > -- > -------------------------------- > http://digitalsynapse.co.nz > http://greymatter.co.nz > -------------------------------- > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WikiEducator" group. 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