Feature Request: integrate the Telescope Podcast into the app

[humphd]

I wrote in my blog about the so-called "Telescope Podcast,"

Their calls were mostly voice-only (I was surprised to observe that they almost never used video), with either screensharing or Visual Studio Code Live Share (collaborative editing, syncing between editors)...

The "Telescope Podcast" is an interesting phenomenon to me, because it's not possible to realize it using only one tool or platform. This is a "Worse is Better" Google Wave without a single product or product owner and with loosely connected, swappable layers:

• GitHub for code sharing and review
• Zeit Now for quick deployment and testing without local setup
• Microsoft Teams for voice chat and screensharing
• Visual Studio Code Live Share for remote pair/group programming
• Slack for text chat
• Blog posts for documenting knowledge outcomes and shared learning

I'd like to propose that we explore the potential for making this workflow a defining aspect of Telescope itself.

Proposal

Make it possible for Telescope to host real-time, online, collaborative development so that people can engage with both past content (blogs) and current content (voice/video streams, chat, screensharing).

I don't know exactly what I mean by this, but here are the pieces that I imagine we could use and explore:

• integrate streaming into the timeline. Maybe it's a separate page, or maybe live streams show-up at the top, sort of like what happens with Live Events in Twitter (they are pinned to the top while they happen). Maybe we can use Twitch or YouTube Live to host this?
• integrate chat (if it's useful) so that people can ask questions of the live stream. This might be something that Twitch/YouTube APIs enable, or maybe we can connect to Slack or Teams, or host another app to make it happen.
• use our SSO to only allow authenticated Seneca users to engage with the stream. Maybe this means that only Seneca users can ask questions.
• is there a way to integrate a VSCode Live Share session in the browser in view-only mode?
• we we automatically record these to YouTube, and have them get hosted (as a feed) in Telescope when it's all done?

Goals

There's an increased awareness of real-time chat, video, audio, and screensharing due to us all being at home for COVID-19. I think some people will continue to want to create and consume edutainment this way. Seneca is full of people who are trying hard to learn how all this technology works, and we could use Telescope as a way to show them how.

I'd like for Telescope the product, and Telescope the project to become more integrated. It would be awesome if people could go form watching the live streams for a few weeks to thinking, "Hey, I want to try this..." and joining in to help improve the code.

This isn't really a proper Issue yet, since I'm not sure what I'm proposing exactly. More, I'd like to see us try and capture some of the best of what worked during our 100% online time this term, and convert that into features we can ship and use as part of Telescope.

[cindyorangis]

I had to let this brew in my head a bit before I wanted to comment. I absolutely love this idea and I can see so much potential here. I might be getting ahead of myself but once we have an integrated Telescope podcast working, I can see Seneca using it as a marketing tool to make their school of tech standout even more among the other colleges and universities. I've watches pre-recorded coding tutorials/courses/classes and live stream coding/designing/drawing/phone interviews before but nothing like what is being proposed here. That being said, I want to explore this idea but dont know what I can bring to the table yet. I do see a dependency on having people willing to stream regularly. I think @Grommers00, @raygervais, @agarcia-caicedo, and @manekenpix are great at it >:D

Speaking of @Grommers00, I haven't seen him in a while. All his Docker up- down-ing helped birth this idea and he just pruned outta here.

[humphd]

I'll write a blog post and get my ideas out into the community, and others can riff off it.

[dbelokon]

Hello, @humphd, @cindyledev!

This really sparked my interested, so I would like to bring this idea "back to life"; it sounds like a really cool feature that everybody would like to try out.

I have a couple of comments/ideas as to how this can be realized:

1. I find that there are three major features that are, in some way, related to each other: regular videos presented in the feed, mixed with the blog posts; livestreams; and chat interaction.
2. The "regular video" component has been progressed by Cindy, with her work on #1168, so maybe we can pick this up and improve the UI and implement the back-end.
3. The "livestream" component involves a lot of moving parts. I have researched a little, and it seems that Youtube provides an API to create livestreams, although this is on a per-account basis. So, the following question, how are we going to manage something like this? Do we ask every Seneca student that has an account in Telescope to create a YouTube account, so that then we can manage the YouTube API on their behalf? Another interesting way we could implement this is by "aggregating livestreams", so that we are not tied to YouTube necessarily (everybody uses the app they would like). However, I am not sure if this is possible.
4. The "chat" component is deeply related to the "livestream" one. Since the first need we have is to only allow Seneca students to interact with the broadcaster, we will need a way to restrict the access to the chat. I am not really sure how this can be implemented, so the only idea is to implement a very rough IRC chat, so we can use the Telescope user data to know which people are allowed to comment/interact.

This is mostly a suggestion on how the front-end can look like for the "livestreams":

Ignoring the clearly pixelated look of the icons, my idea is that we can provide that small window for any livestreams that are currently online, and possibly give the option to the user to close it if they are not interested on any livestreams at the moment.

I would like to end this by saying that I would like to pick up the work from Cindy, as the "livestream" part of this issue can be thoroughly discussed at a later moment. Let me know if you have any suggestions 😄

[humphd]

@dbelokon OK, I'm glad to see someone who wants to take this a bit further. You're right to split this issue up into smaller pieces, since it's way too big for us to make progress on (which is why we haven't). I think building out the UI side of this, separate from having all the live stream bits figured out, makes sense. I'd encourage you to go for it.

[cindyorangis]

I'm excited for this idea to be resurrected

[sirinoks]

Whoever was a part of the podcast before, I want to start streaming about Telescope. If anyone is interested in being there, let me know.

[humphd]

This was mainly @cindyledev, @raygervais, @manekenpix, @Grommers00, @agarcia-caicedo I think.

[sirinoks]

I will post a link on Slack when I will do this. Otherwise, talk to me there before it, so we can maybe plan

[sirinoks]

Follow #3035

[joelazwar]

Closing this in favor of twitch streams instead