I’m happy to announce that DigidemLab / Collective.tools, femProcomuns / CommonsCloud and Webarchitects have established a new co-operative with the aim of providing an open source, co-operative alternative to corporate systems such as Zoom:
Other organisations are welcome to get involved.
Oh this is great! I would be certainly interested in joining and this completely overlaps with the Zoom-alternative thread here 
I can imagine a federated coop like this can become an international bastion of platform cooperativism?
I think it would be nice if we can all meet (using this) and discuss ideas!
Btw, have you spoken to the original authors of BigBlueButton? My friends and I in Japan have recently looked at how to install BBB and a few unfinished docker-ization attempts left in the repositories.
Well done @chris, just emailed the address from the website, hopefully our co-op can become a member organisation. So exciting!
Could we possibly try it out on coming Friday evening for CoTech e-drinks?
We don’t yet have a BigBlueButton server up and running but as soon as one is I’ll let you know.
Hi Chris. Would you be able to comment on the applicability / strength of Big Blue Button for live music streaming?
…at decent quality (not necessarily sync / collaborative playing!) …and an ability to easily switch from best broadcast quality back to collaborative / meetup quallity…
We here at Resonate.IS the music streaming co-op are interested in doing a good privacy-respecting job here 
Nick
Or maybe these remain more appropriate for streaming at quality and it is best to swap between streaming and meeting…
https://openstreamingplatform.com/
@nmeyne if you want two way interaction then BigBlueButton makes sense, if you just want to broadcast then I don’t think it does.
Thanks Chris. Agree… But I think we need both… and a means of swapping seamlessly between broadcast performance mode and audience chat / interaction mode. I think it will be clunky.
C O N G R A T S
We had our second meet.coop weekly BBB organising meeting today with co-operators from 4 continents present and I have just setup wiki.meet.coop for the co-operative to document everything.
Brilliant! Just what we need.
As mentioned in another thread:
This Platform Cooperativism course is coming up. I think meet.coop could be an excellent subject!!
Today the Online Meeting Co-operative decided today to host the first meet.coop server with Koumbit co-operative in Montreal, Canada .
More information can be found on the wiki and the Online Meeting Co-operative open Discourse forum:
Last night I deployed a Online Meeting Co-operative BigBlueButton server that has open registration so people have give it a try, we should use it for the next CoTech call and I’d like to urge all the CoTech co-ops to sign up for an account and test it internally — I really want to get everyone off Zoom and onto an co-operative alternative!
Thanks for this Chris. We will give it a go!
Thanks @alex, all the code for deploying it is here:
And if you have any feedback please post it to the forum:
Wow, just gave it an initial spin and it’s swish! Will hold Animorph general meeting on it next week and will come back with feedback.
Thanks so much for making it happen!!!
There’s a COVID 19 hackathon next week. I mention it here because packaging Big Blue Button for easy deployment to debian-using servers is on its task list. Is anyone willing to help?
Thanks for posting that @mjray, it would be an interesting learning exercise, even if it ultimately failed…
The current version of BigBlueButton, 2.2, runs on Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial and pulls in most of the software as .deb's, from three repos, so I guess the first job would be to identify all of the packages and then look how many are already in Debian and how many would need adding and also how many are the wrong versions.
The next version of BigBlueButton, 2.4 will run on Ubuntu 18.04 and that might be more realistic to target for Buster, however there are no releases for it yet.
If I had some time to spend on this I’d probably start with looking at packaging Greenlight, the HTML5 front end, for Debian Buster, currently this is run via Docker on Alpine — having multiple Debian VMs for Greenlight with BBB on Ubuntu for the backend would be an approach I’d probably prefer for hosting the application.
However time is really in short supply and we have written Ansible to deploy BigBlueButton and this is working well, we hosted a meeting for 50+ people today and the server didn’t break into a sweat.