NixCon 2020 Meeting Notes - August 18, 2020

Events NixCon
1

Attendees: @edef, nbathum, puck, @qyliss, @zimbatm

Work continues: planning and standing up infrastructure. Today we discussed our progress over the past two weeks and our next goals.

Call for Participation is open!
Submit your talk or lightning talk here: NixCon 2020: Online Edition :: pretalx.

AV Infrastructure
AV work is progressing well.

  • Showed Jitsi stats over XMPP. This setup will serve multiple needs.
    • system performance monitoring
    • mimic the in-person-like experience: the hallway track. We intend to show some information about the inhabitants of the Jitsi rooms.
  • Looking into bridge cascading for Jitsi. Cascading will help when a room has people from different geographical areas.
    • We can use this to help share the load. Other providers/hosts with existing Jitsi servers could configure them to point to the main video bridge.
    • Need to contact @snajpa and @martyet with vpsFree.cz on this question.
  • RTMP streaming and DASH: Tested a video stream flowing from RTMP, conversion into DASH, and viewed in a browser.
    • Next is further testing, including testing the viewer on the 2020.nixcon.org website.
    • RTMP is one-to-n DASH servers. We can offer multiple bitrates.
    • We intend for viewers to load the page and route them to a nearby DASH server for viewing.

Website

Misc

  • Knowing rough attendance numbers and geolocations would help for capacity planning.
  • We will publish all our various work into a mono repo in NixCon - the conference about Nix & NixOS · GitHub. Future conferences can reuse the components.
    • Currently, the various work is split across different people/teams in different timezones. For sanity sake and getting things running, we will look to get things public and re-integrate the work later.

Sponsors

  • How should sponsorship work for this conference?
  • The important thing is to keep/establish good relationships with the sponsoring companies.
  • Without a physical space, how can we provide value to sponsors? What are our costs/justification?
    • Provide space for sponsors and branding on the conference website
    • Thank the sponsors
    • Dedicated intros and read-outs between talks/blocks
    • Dedicated spaces/custom (distinct) Jitsi rooms? We’re trying to figure out how to emphasize the human element.
    • Dedicated sponsor talk slot?
  • The donations will go to the NixOS Foundation directly, and we’ll recoup our costs by submitting expenses to The NixOS Foundation - Open Collective.
  • We’ll have infra costs: bandwidth, servers
    • We want to provide a digital microphone to every speaker. Maybe people who already have a pro-audio setup can opt-out.
    • Do we also get the speaker’s webcams? (webcams are challenging to come by right now)
    • What about paying speakers for their time?
    • Infra costs estimation (back of napkin level)
      • bandwidth (need to get prices, consider bit-rates)
      • ~700 € for Jitsi cores, (3 * 12 hours, 10k participants)
      • load testing
      • RTMP
      • DASH

Next meeting: 2020-09-01T16:00:00Z

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