Online Meetings

[SamuelFoster]

We've mentioned the potential for team/subteam meetings occurring online through some sort of software.

As of yet, we haven't fully discussed what software to use.

The recommendations that I remember are Skype, IRC, and Mumble.

We should discuss the pros and cons of these choices as well as alternative solutions.

I personally would prefer an option that allows both voice and text communication, so that both the more vocal and less vocal among us can contribute effectively.

Out of these recommendations, I personally support Mumble. If I remember correctly, Mumble supports individual voice and text chatrooms under a single larger chatroom, so we could have individual chatrooms for each subteam for subteam meetings and a global chatroom for whole-team meetings. I've also heard that Mumble is more efficient with bandwidth usage, which would be good for anyone running on limited bandwidth. Mumble is also multiplatform.

[SamuelFoster]

One con of Mumble (I believe) is that we would need a centralized Mumble server. I believe this would require one of us to host a dedicated Mumble server, or host one through some third party.

[thom5468]

@SamuelFoster Thanks for bringing this up. I personally have never used mumble but, based on the sprint meeting, it sounds like an application that would suit our needs. On the other hand, this could be something that each team needs to discuss internally.

[jleithart]

I actually have a 30 person mumble already set up if we need to use it

[cawaltrip]

On the Mumble FAQ they say that the bandwidth requirements are primarily up to each individual user. For voice chat, with top quality speech, minimum latency and positional information set, it is 133.6 kbit/s and with a higher delay, lowest quality speech and no positional information it's 17.4 kbit/s. The default settings give a bandwidth requirement of 58.8 kbit/s Even with my connection at home, I would be able to handle most everyone sending information at the highest quality.

[Greg-Donaldson]

I personally prefer Skype, since its easier to get everything set up for it. However, I could work with Mumble easy enough.

[cawaltrip]

I'm not a huge fan of Skype for a number of reasons, but personal feelings aside, my biggest issue is the bandwidth requirements. Skype tends to like to be a bandwidth hog and that can quickly become an issue for me. Skype recommends 100 kbps up and down per user.

[andyleejordan]

@SamuelFoster I actually already have both Mumble and XMPP servers running reliably on my VPS. For Mumble, just connect to schwartzmeyer.com. For XMPP, well that's federated anyway, if you don't have an XMPP account already (unlikely) I can provide anyone with one at any of my domains (though I tend to reserve schwartzmeyer.com for family accounts). I've also been wanting to host an IRC server for forever anyway, so I could stand one of those up for us real quick.

[andyleejordan]

Connection details for Mumble

Server Address

schwartzmeyer.com

Port

64738 (this is the default)

Channel

There is a channel "Software Engineering" under "University of Idaho".

Info

Join with your desired username; if you want to keep it, register it.

[andyleejordan]

Speaking of meetings, @hall5714 we should get a Server Team meeting scheduled so we can start working.

[cawaltrip]

Closed due to being moved to the wiki: Mumble Server