Participate

Listening to a summit session as an Ogg stream

If you do not wish to participate in a session, but would like to hear the discussions, each of the sessions will have an Ogg vorbis stream. The URLs for the streams are listed in the schedules at http://people.ubuntu.com/~scott/uds-boston-2007/.

Listening to a summit session using VOIP

If you do not wish to participate in a session, but are still interested in hearing the discussions, each of the sessions will have a listen-only conference call that will allow you to hear both the attendees in the room, and those participating remotely.

Anyone is welcome to listen to the conference calls, and you will not be required to register an account with us to do so. You can also disregard the below hardware requirements - you will not be heard in the conference call, so your sound setup or background noise will not disturb it. All you need to do is use a SIP client to dial the listen-only address for the appropriate session. You don't need to follow the configuration guides below either, you can either use your existing SIP provider, or install Twinkle and make an anonymous call.

The numbers for the listen-only conference calls are listed in the schedules at http://people.ubuntu.com/~scott/uds-boston-2007/.

Participating in a summit session using VOIP

If you do want to participate in a session, you will be connected to a full VOIP conference call, allowing developers and interested parties who are unable to attend in person, to take part.

Please note that all times on the schedule are local-time to the conference, which is in UTC-0400 (This is 'New York' time, or EDT)

Anyone is welcome to join the conference calls, however, we will require you to register an account with us to avoid disrupting the session with background noise, feedback, poor connections, etc. These accounts are temporary and can only be used for joining UDS conference calls.

To obtain a voip login:

  • Visit #canonical-sysadmin on Freenode and ask either Ng, Spads, Znarl, or elmo to create you an account.

  • We will then ask you to login and join a test conference call so we can verify your settings and audio quality.

What you will need

Headphones

If you wish to take part in the summit calls, you will need to use headphones, not speakers. Most VOIP software does not mute the speakers when sound is detected by the microphone, and this can create a distracting echo or feedback effect that gets worse as more users join.

Microphone

If you wish to take part in the summit calls, you will need a microphone. There are three basic types:

  1. Headset microphone
  2. Standalone microphone
  3. Integrated microphone

Of these types, the first two will be significantly better - integrated microphones (e.g. built into a laptop) tend to be very poor quality and because they are physically attached to machinery, they will pick up vibrations such as fans, disks and most of all, typing. You should keep your microphone muted while you are not speaking and especially while you are typing. In fact, you must mute it if you use an integrated microphone: random sounds on the room speakers are very distracting during a discussion.

VOIP connection

Any VOIP software or hardware capable of connecting to SIP addresses will be suitable and the addresses to call are listed on the schedule: http://people.ubuntu.com/~scott/uds-boston-2007/. Below are some links to guides for configuring various SIP clients available in Ubuntu (please feel free to add more!):

  1. Ekiga (recommended)

  2. Twinkle

  3. KPhone

If you already have a SIP client configured, please read SIP Guidelines

Collaborative Editing using Gobby

Gobby is being used at UDS-Boston to collaborate on the specifications that are being written and to facilitate remote participation.

To take part, please install Gobby (available in universe, but you will need to be using at least the version from Edgy. If you are running Dapper, backported packages are available at http://people.ubuntu.com/~cmsj/gobby/) and tell it to connect to gobby.ubuntu.com. You will be presented with a list of documents being edited.

During any session or meeting, and particularly at the end of one, please do make a local backup of your documents.

Discussion using IRC

In addition to the above services, each summit schedule will have an associated IRC channel on Freenode for additional discussion, sharing links, or anything else that isn't suitable for VOIP/Gobby.

For general discussion, the #uds-boston IRC channel on Freenode is open.

UDS-Boston/Participate (last edited 2008-08-06 17:01:09 by localhost)