The BigBlueButton project finished its 14th developers summit at Algonquin College, Ottawa, Ontario on May 10th, hosting 25 developers from around the world.
Attending the summit were developers from Brazil, Germany, Spain, USA, Tunisia, and Canada to participate in a week of coding, meetings, and team building events (read: lots of good food after long days of coding :-).
The organizations that participated at the summit included
- Algonquin College Office of Applied Research (host)
- Blindside Networks
- HostBBB
- iMDT
- Mconf Technologies
- Navea Tech
- Radvice
“Each summit has enabled us to move the BigBlueButton project forward by having a week of concentrated development without distractions,” says Fred Dixon, BigBlueButton Product Manager. “This summit had the most developers and was most productive we’ve had yet. Building up the release of the HTML5 client, we now have more developers working in parallel than ever before.”
At the summit the sprints included:
- Increasing accessibility for screen readers
- Adding a new “notes” recording format to capture shared notes
- Updating the core to the latest versions of Kurento
- Researching automated speech-to-text conversion for recordings
- Adding support for right-to-left languages in the HTML5 client
- Exporting metrics from recorded meetings
The goal of the BigBlueButton project is to enable instructors to provide remote students a high-quality online learning experience.
“We also use the summit as an opportunity to plan the features of BigBlueButton for the next six months, and in doing so we continually ask ourselves ‘How can we make the job of the instructor easier when teaching an online class?’”
To try out the latest builds of BigBlueButton, visit https://demo.bigbluebutton.org/.
For documentation on setup and installation of your own BigBlueButton 2.2 server with the latest build of the HTML5 client see https://docs.bigbluebutton.org/.
Thanks to John Omura and the Applied Research and Innovation (ARI) department of Algonquin College for being such excellent hosts. Through ARI, Algonquin College supports R&D projects with local industry partners like Blindside Networks as ‘win-win’ collaborations between a partner company, student research assistants and a lead professor. These teams work together to develop company-defined deliverables, while the students gain valuable ‘hands-on’ experience and an opportunity to apply the skill-sets they have acquired in their academic programs.
Next developer summit is planned for November 2019 in Brazil. If you are interested in attending the summit (or sponsoring it), please contact Fred Dixon.
