Inspiring people to communicate...

By: Steffen Gebert

Announcing the TYPO3 BigBlueButton web conferencing server.

It turned out long time ago that communication is a key factor of successful and transparent open source development.
A lot of work within the TYPO3 community is achieved teams, which have been established after in order to cope with a specific task or topic, like the Documentation team, Server Administration Team, Workspaces Team, Core Team, and so on.

As all the people in all these teams are heavily distributed all over the world and do TYPO3 work mostly in their spare time, there is a lack of regular physical meetings. Instead, online chats or Skype calls took place, to keep everybody up to date, inform about results, or ask for feedback or support.

Starting with the "Daily Scrum" of the TYPO3 Phoenix team, which takes place every day at 11:30am CET and the aim for more transparency towards other interested community members, a conferencing server has been set up some time ago. Product of choice back then was BigBlueButton, a LGPL-licensed conference server software.

As other teams started using this server, too, the need for a more usable interface than the default demo interface raised. This work has now been achieved by members of the TYPO3 Server Admin Team, in particular Susanne Moog, who created the JSP-based interface.

With this new interface, it is now possible for everybody not only to quickly start new meetings, but also to see the a list of currently active meetings with the option to join them. Before, a URL had to be exchanged, in order to enable other people to join the meetings, which then happened somehow invisible to the outside.

Because of the complicated interface and the lack of an official announcement, the TYPO3 BigBlueButton (BBB) server was more a tool for a circle of insiders. We hope that now more and more teams start making use of this service, while being more open towards interested parties though. On the other hand, we hope that people find it a useful tool, when setting up spontaneous meetings, e.g. after discussing things lengthy in mailing lists or joining forces to kickstart a new team.

TYPO3's BigBlueButton server can be found on http://bigbluebutton.typo3.org

Have fun!

Your TYPO3 Server Admin Team
TYPO3 .... Inspiring people to share - and communicate!

Btw: The code for our GPL-licensed interface is available on the github page of TYPO3.