On Fri 14 Jun 2013 08:42:30 AM PDT, Rafael Knuth wrote:
One of our key takeaways was that many attendees from emerging regions like Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia Pacific were not able to join our Google+ Hangout due to bandwidth limitations.
I have experienced the same issues with Hangouts with my brother in Italy (his home is very distant from the ADSL switch --whatever it's called, and his connection speed is very low). Hangout uses too much bandwidth for some parts of the world.
We spoke with OpenStackers in Ghana, Ethiopia, India and we came up with the following idea: Why don't we transcribe our Google+ Hangout sessions and distribute that content live via IRC?
Have you considered ditching Hangout altogether at this point and go straight to IRC? What would Hangout be used for? If (understandably) you would like to use voice for the meeting, I would look at alternatives like Mumble/Murmur or good old phone lines sided with slides shared online as simple html. For low bandwidth that should be more than enough and every participant is on the same level (no first class citizens). Mozilla Foundation uses https://air.mozilla.org/ where they stream audio and video (broadcast, from multiple sites now) from the rooms they meet in and accept questions in from audience via IRC. This is an example of a recorded meeting https://air.mozilla.org/the-monday-meeting-20130610/. It used to be less sophisticated than that, the latest recordings seem too fancy :) I think it would be good to have a general purpose platform, simple to use, to connect events across the world. I think a URL to announce the event, share slides and one-click-connect to live audio stream (video, if possible) would be great to have. /stef -- Ask and answer questions on https://ask.openstack.org