Notify people when an active Huddle is going on

[jpd236]

• Via Slack
• Via Sheets?

[jpziegler]

Just noticed that this may be OBE because Sheets has integrated Hangouts now. This is probably the way we should be collaborating live on a puzzle.

[jpd236]

I recall using huddles in Slack last year, but looking at it now, they're limited to two people on the free tier. I think we might have had a free trial of pro Slack last time, but the cost now is prohibitively expensive (likely over $1000) since it's per user. So I don't think that's a good path.

I like the concept of using the built-in Sheets video call. But in practice, it only seems very loosely associated with the sheet itself; if one person starts a call, the other people won't see it. You'd need to start a call and then share the link with others to get people to join it. I don't see a way to associate a call with the sheet such that people see it automatically - it shows links based on your calendar, which isn't helpful here.

In the past we'd use 8x8.vc for per-puzzle video calls linked from Sheets, Slack, and Big Board. Dima explicitly removed this last year, under this reasoning:

I will not be setting up video channels for individual puzzles by default. This is for two reasons -- first, many of us will be in group settings rather than individual offices so sound/video management would be more impractical. Second, most of us are probably not flying to Boston just so we can video call someone to work on a puzzle.

For the most part, I expect that a puzzle will be worked on by either a group of onsite solvers, collaborating in-person, or a group of remote solvers, collaborating over slack. Please be clear when starting a puzzle which is going on -- e.g. put whether/where you're working in person in the template sheet. If you're all working remote and in the slack channel, you can still start a video call within the slack channel.

This makes some sense, but with Slack huddles now behind a paywall, it may be worth resurrecting convenient links to something.

So I think we have to start by figuring out what's going to be our per-puzzle video call system of choice this year. My proposal, to keep things consistent with the HQ VC, would just be to go back to 8x8.vc unless there's some issue there with pricing, and to resurrect the per-puzzle links for convenience.

Once we have that, we could evaluate whether it's possible to easily track the number of people in a call for notification purposes. But personally I probably wouldn't want to try and chase this down for this year's hunt.

[jpd236]

I've reverted back to the 2022 approach of 8x8.vc links everywhere, so we should have readily available video calls again. We can reconsider for this year if I get any feedback on the recent email I sent to the team.

Putting this on the longer-term list for tracking and notifying about presence within the calls.