vFUDcon ideas

[Karsten Wade]

On Tue, 2007-07-31 at 14:40 -0400, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-08-01 at 00:02 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> > Karsten Wade wrote:
> > > There is a virtual FUDCon happening, which means online, maybe Asterisk
> > > for VoIP conferencing.
> > 
> > I am curious about how that would work. Do these provide international 
> > toll free dialing? 
> 
> I don't know all the ways that the service provisioning will work, since
> I'm (a) not doing it, and (b) not an Asterisk expert.  But I think the
> idea is that people should be able to dial in with an Ekiga or other
> softphone for free from anywhere they can get on an IP based network.  

That's right.  Jared Smith is working with Dennis Gilmore and Jeff Ollie
(who is also the packager for asterisk and linphone, iirc), and they are
using a Fedora server.  We'll likely have the service disabled for use
most of the time, but able to be turned on for e.g. Fedora Board
meetings or FESCo meetings, etc.  It's a new idea, we want to be careful
about abusing, and we want to learn as we go so we can rapidly scale it.
AIUI, the main constraint is CPU with the codecs.

> I
> kind of doubt there are time, resources, and money to hook up a
> toll-free hardline phone service, but I would love to be wrong about
> that.  If people can't do a softphone in, though, how likely is it that
> they are planning to participate in the project afterward?

There *may* be a US-based number available; Fedora could certainly
provide an inbound number in e.g. the 919 or Phoenix area codes for
pretty low cost.  There is some value in having this, but not IMO in
having a toll-free number.  There isn't an international toll-free
method that Fedora is going to support, and it is not worth it to offer
toll-free in the US when long distance rates in the US are cheap or
bundled unlimited.

Reasons:

* Want to participate but nowhere near an IP network
* Firewall between you and the world blocks SIP
* Bandwidth constraints
* No headset, making onboard mic/speaker a nightmare for everyone on the
call (tap tap tappity tap, remember that Paul?)
* No sound card on hardware

And so forth.  I feel the need is enough to support e.g. $5/mon for a
PTSN line for Fedora, but not enough to support a toll-free number. :)

> > Do you have the ability to record and transcribe it?

AIUI, yes, Asterisk can handle recording; that is a big reason to use
it.  We'll release them as podcasts afterward, is the idea; a great task
for some contributors in this team or Websites or Ambassadors would be
to convert these to podcasts (OGG only, naturally.)  I agree with Paul
about transcribing, and I realize this limits our international audience
(and ability to translate.)  Still, this is a first time.  If someone
wants to transcribe, that's a great idea.

In fact, we could even clone and rework the 'press-release' module/DTD
to support a transcription.  This way we could have a very simplified
XML to work with for a transcriber, and have it generate a sane POT
file.  But let's see if the transcribers appear first, okay?

- Karsten
-- 
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