NixCon 2020: Announcement

Are you looking forward to a NixCon online? I know I am!

When: October 16th-18th 2020
exact timezone/schedule details TBD

Where: livestreaming on youtube + something else for the hackday

Work is underway for an online version of NixCon to take place this year. Planning and organizational work are ongoing, and everyone is welcome and encouraged to participate. Our next meeting is next Monday, July 13th, 12:00 pm EDT or 6:00 pm GMT+2 – next meeting event

The website for NixCon 2020 will be up soon and a call for participation will be announced. Updates will be posted in this thread. Join us in the #nixcon channel on Freenode to discuss things further.

Cheers & may everyone stay safe and healthy,

CC @zimbatm @flokli

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7/20/2020 NixCon 2020 Meeting Notes

@flokli @zimbatm @edef @qyliss puck @nbathum met on Jitsi.

Free Software!

Thanks to the hard work from Puck, @qyliss, and @edef who have put together an excellent proposal and demo with Jitsi, we’ve decided a few things regarding which AV technologies we will use.

  • Discord will not be used
  • Breakout rooms will use Jitsi
  • Speakers can present through Jitsi, or stream from OBS or equivalent RTMP solution
  • Primary streaming using MPEG-DASH
  • Main track will also simultaneously stream to YouTube

Again, impressive, and thank you all for helping! I hope everyone will be happy to see this. I don’t remember who said this today, but I’m going to quote it again shamelessly. How cool will it be to run our conference “powered by Free software with NixOS.”

We will perform testing of this before the conference. If anyone is interested in giving a talk to facilitate testing, please speak up. Also, perhaps the group here Is there any regular casual NixOS Online Meeting? - #27 by yasu may be interested in holding a session on Jitsi?

Conference Experience

There is some pondering about the experience and conference format and how best to support it. Ideas include supporting chat and breakout rooms using a combination of IRC and Jitsi, or Jitsi alone. We welcome any opinions or input regarding these things.

Short term todos

Next Meeting

2020-08-03T16:00:00Z
Please join #nixcon or check back here closer to the meeting date for details.

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I missed this! Can we have a follow-up Con for another timezone? I live in Japan :sweat_smile:

I have been also experimenting with BIgBlueButton on Ubuntu on VirtualBox on NixOS :sweat_smile: with great success.

I am also trying to package BBB for NixOS

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Thanks for working on this!

Jitsi + Zulip might be another option. They already have some integration with each other. I imagine Zulip’s threaded nature might work much better when many people are discussing things at the same time.

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Jitsi + Zulip might be another option. They already have some integration with each other. I imagine Zulip’s threaded nature might work much better when many people are discussing things at the same time.

I guess dedicated IRC server with rooms spawned per-topic could work for separation, but I guess something with built-in notion of server-side history could be nice, too

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Zulip threads also have much nicer discoverability, since its possible to follow all threads in the “main” channel (or narrow the view down to one thread / silence individual threads). I think that is better than ephemeral IRC channels.

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samueldr keeps online logs for the various Nix IRC rooms on freenode.

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A key feature that we want to have is: the ability to track and advertise presence in the various rooms. This is important to restore some of the feeling from physical conferences where groups are dynamically formed around certain topics or interests.

We don’t know how to exactly achieve that yet :slight_smile:

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Yasu, This was an organizing meeting for NixCon. If you meant that you’d like to attend and help organize, awesome! I will figure out how to adjust the time to include you.

What I was trying to say about Jitsi is that we want to host some multi-national get-togethers between now and October, something like a casual Nix chat or informal NixOS office hours, to test the performance of Jitsi.

Would 8:00 PM work (are you UTC+9)? That would be 7:00 AM for me and 1:00 PM for UTC+2

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Oh I see, I thought you meant NixCon itself! But why not, sure! Yes, that time would work for me!
In addition, I am involved with https://meet.coop, an international multi-stakeholder cooperative we are trying to create to be a alternative of Zoom, owned by the people involved. (See https://forum.meet.coop/ for discussions we have been having)

Why don’t I suggest we use meet.coop for this event?

https://forum.meet.coop/t/hosting-nixcon-2020/230

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Thank you for offering to use meet.coop for meeting. We will continue using Jitsi for this purpose.

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No problem, just a thought :smile:

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Please find our latest meeting notes: NixCon 2020 Meeting Notes - Mon, August 3, 2020

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Friendly reminder that NixCon 2020 is tomorrow!

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I have my alarm set to wake me up at 2020-10-16T11:00:00Z.

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