Ha! what about xmpp? Honestly IRC is pretty populated I can’t imagine video and voice all bundled up. I would video conference but would rather use a more hacker friendly medium (not hangouts, skype, facetime).
On the topic. Pinged you. Interested. Hope to see you!
I don’t think Hacker needs to mean elitist, and by forcing people to use non standard software it’s exclusionary, especially if you include people outside the HSF.
I think Hangouts would be best.
For what it’s worth I agree with @unknowndomain - the most accessible solution is generally the best one when it comes to being inclusive.
That said - careful about the use of “non standard”, it’s very easy to end up in a ridiculous argument as things like IRC and XMPP have been around way longer than hangouts. They’re also irrelevant as this would need to be video anyway.
FWIW I have extensively tested video chat apps for large groups (both closed and open source) and hangouts is the only one that even vaguely manages >12 people in a chatroom.
All I mean by non-standard is something that isn’t widely used by non-techies, of which there are many among the wider open workshop term.
I agree Hangouts is best, it’s what we’ve used for large Maker Faire organiser events because it’s easy to mute people and adjust their volume levels etc…
If video is needed then the best and less elitest and also hacker friendly (for me hacker friendly is that you can tinker with it) is webrtc. You just need to send a link to someone and ‘presto’ video conference in your browser.
I believe that is easier than hangouts. If you want to keep it private you can use a password.
WebRTC relies on good bandwidth between clients, and the more you have the more this becomes a problem…
Funny, I did notice that problem with skype and hangouts and not with webrtc(no registration needed). Then again it is not a fair comparison since it’s been years since I used hangouts and skype.
Go for hangouts. I guess everybody has Google accounts now, like when everybody had Hotmail/ messenger.
I moved this from the original topic.
Anyways, if you guys would like me to organise this then I can do that for a weekend or evening.
Would folks be interested?
Quick note on webrtc: It requires every client to stream video directly to every other client, meaning the amount of bandwidth goes up exponentially with the number of users in a chat. It really really doesn’t work well for video chats over ~10 people, or people on poor connections.
As I said, I work mostly remotely in a large team with daily video calls, we’ve tested basically every video chat client going and Hangouts is the only one that works with big groups at all.
I too would prefer an open solution, but they’re all just terrible for this at the moment! Motivation to write one 
Quick added note: We frequently have work meetings with 50 people and use Zoom for the purpose. The free one is capped at 40 minutes, commercial is unlimited. Zoom works exceedingly well even at scale and has commercial-like features even in the free version.
I suspect the 40 minute cap is way too short for what we’re talking about but noted here in light of the comments about bad experiences with other solutions.
we also use Zoom at work for large meetings -works well
yes - would be interested
+1 interested
I’m going to try and organise this and get it started, I’m keen to set a date in the next couple weeks.
I’m minded to suggest an evening but I recognise a lot of people may have families.
Would a weekend work for people instead?
This would be on Google Hangouts, once we are up and running then we can consider other technical options, but at this point it’s bike shedding…
cool - Doodle works well for organising this sort of stuff, use it all the time. After 8pm works for me 
Looks like Google Hangouts doesn’t really work any more like it used to, anyone up for a test run?
Also thinking it would be good to have a tour of one workshop by a participent, would anyone be up for volunteering?
Anyone else going to join? There were a lot of people vocal about not having access to the OWL event online, and now I’ve organised this there is only 3 people signed up to attend and they’re not even the same people.
I can make it! Sorry for delay!
I’m in
