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Run an etherpad-focused video conference server¶
https://storyboard.openstack.org/…
This is a proposal to run a self-hosted instance of jitsi-meet with tight integration with our etherpad server to help facilitate remote design sessions.
Problem Description¶
The OpenDev community is soon looking at having its first virtual PTG due to the current pandemic in addition to being strong advocates and innovators in remote collaboration for years.
One of the key activities at PTGs are time-limited sessions where contributors gather together and discuss future work with the help of an etherpad to record notes, requirements, and work items from the session. We may be able to approximate this virtually using jitsi-meet and etherpad.
(Another important activity involves beer afterwords; this spec does not address that need.)
Proposed Change¶
Jitsi-meet is a FLOSS video conferencing system. It’s based on nice open standards like XMPP, but users don’t need to know about that. Most users will interact with it via a browser using WEBRTC and it will appear just like other popular web video conferencing systems.
Unlike others, however, it has built-in integration with etherpad, so that we can configure it so that collaborative documentation editing will take center stage, rather than a giant talking head (though that is still an option for individual users if they wish).
We will call the service meetpad and run it at
meetpad.opendev.org. Giving it a stronger individual brand may
help communicate the intended use and focus better, and help convey
how this is different than other video conferencing.
Alternatives¶
We could do nothing, which will likely lead to users using either the existing audio-only conferencing bridge, or far more likely, combining proprietary video conferencing services in one window with collaborative document editing in another.
We could work on vaccine research instead of developing software, though that is outside of most our areas of expertise. Even if we did that, we’d still probably want video conferencing.
Implementation¶
We will create a new VM and run the full jitsi-meet stack using docker-compose. It consists of 4 services: the web service, the video bridge, the focus controller, and an XMPP server. These all run well in containers, and the existing docker-jitsi-meet project has worked out how to run all of them together.
The web service is written as a React Javascript application, a framework which some OpenDev contributors already have familiarity, so potential future customization is possible.
We will configure jitsi-meet to use our existing etherpad server for
shared document editing. We will also configure it to use the “room
name” as the etherpad name. This will make it easy to prepare
etherpads before conferences and refer to them afterwords. Users
would visit a url such as
https://meetpad.opendev.org/zuulv5-planning for a video
conference, and that would use the etherpad at
https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/zuulv5-planning. The predictable
URLs will make it easy to find meetings and find their notes after
they are complete.
We will also make a small change to the jitsi-meet software so that the etherpad is automatically opened when a user joins a room. Users can still close and re-open the etherpad at will in order to engage in screen sharing or other uses of the main window, but since the service is etherpad focused, that should be the initial state.
Assignee(s)¶
- Primary assignee:
corvus
Gerrit Topic¶
Use Gerrit topic meetpad for all patches related to this spec.
git-review -t meetpad
Work Items¶
Create meetpad.opendev.org server
Build custom jitsi-meet web container image (with open-etherpad-on-startup patch)
Deploy full stack with docker-compose and letsencrypt
Repositories¶
None, unless we are unable to upstream our customizations to jitsi-meet, in which case we may need to carry a thin fork.
Servers¶
meetpad.opendev.org VM.
DNS Entries¶
meetpad.opendev.org A record and associated letsencrypt records.
Documentation¶
We will need a new page in the system-config documentation describing the deployment. If we find this satisfactory, we should work with OpenDev communities to promote its use during virtual events. We may want to integrate it with ptgbot.
Security¶
This server will have no special access to privileged data, no special access to the etherpad service, and like etherpad itself, all usage will be anonymous.
Testing¶
Typical system-config deployment testing should be feasible on this stack.
Dependencies¶
None.
