The BigBlueButton team – represented by Blindside Networks, iMDT, and Mconf – participated in Paris HackDays, an open invitation by Direction Interministérielle du Numérique (DINUM), the Interministerial Directorate for Digital Affairs within the French government.
Today, DINUM offers La Suite, an integrated suite of open source tools that help governments be more efficient and work towards achieving digital sovereignty. One of these tools is docs, a Notion-like clone that recently reached number one on Hacker News.
The HackDays was an invitation for open source projects to come together and improve these tools for the French Government, and by extension, all European countries.
BigBlueButton has a special place within the French Government as the official State Webinar system.
We of course attended!
Picture of the BigBlueButton team with Stéphanie Schaer, Directrice interministérielle du numérique (yellow lanyard). Left to right, the BigBlueButton team members were Tiago Jacobs (iMDT), Lucas Zawacki (Mconf), Julia Rathke (Mconf), Guilherme Leme (iMDT), Gustavo Trott (iMDT), and Fred Dixon (Blindside Networks).
The Problem
For every webinar meeting within the French Government, the problem is capturing, summarizing, and re-using this content from the session.
Common questions include
- Where can I find the attendance list and voting results?
- What were the key outcomes?
- What are the next steps?
As meetings are recorded, the organizer could manually extract the audio, run it through speech-to-text, and use the text with AI to summarize the meeting minutes into a shared document (or email out) for further collaboration, perhaps to better prepare for the next meeting.
We thought we could do better.
The Solution
Our idea was to embed docs into BigBlueButton and use AI to summarize the meetings.
First, we broke the problem down into four steps
- We extended the BigBlueButton API so it would also create a new docs document for each meetingID. Since docs doesn’t provide such an API, we used playwright to login to docs, create a new document, and return the URL. That was definitely a hack, but it worked!
- We embedded docs both in a panel and main area in BigBlueButton 3.0 (more on that below).
- We created a new recording format called transcript that both called Albert, DINUM’s internal AI to do speech-to-text and create a summary of the meeting (key points and action items).
- We appended this to the corresponding docs document
Here’s the result in a 1:30 minute video we did for the final pitch on Day 3.
We placed in the top 10!
From a field of 300 developers, there were 53 projects submitted for judging in the competition.
We made the cutoff for the top 10 and presented on Day 3 to the jury of representatives from Germany, France, and the Netherlands.
While we ultimately didn’t place in the top 3, everyone was impressed with our accomplishments.
“The quality of submissions for the first annual Paris HackDays was amazing. The French Government has been building out a suite of open source applications, called La Suite, to make collaboration more efficient and strengthen digital sovereignty. Today, we use BigBlueButton as our state webinar system and recently created La Suite Docs, a notion-like product for simple, secure, and effective note taking and collaboration,” says Samuel Paccoud, Chef de Pôle Suite Numérique.
“At Paris HackDays, the BigBlueButton team demonstrated a seamless integration of Docs into BigBlueButton, as well as an AI generated summary of the meeting automatically uploaded to Docs, for increasing the efficiency of collaboration of every webinar within the government.”
Embedding docs into BigBlueButton
How were we able to achieve this integration in two days? (Actually, the days were from 9:00 am to 11:30 PM, so it felt more like four days :-).
It was possible because of BigBlueButton 3.0 and its new plug-in architecture. We created a plugin that embedded docs, via an iFrame, into either the left panel or the main presentation area.
This project enabled us to showcase the ability for BigBlueButton 3.0 to move from an application to a platform.
Like Moodle, developers can extend BigBlueButton 3.0 with their own plugins. This brings modularity to BigBlueButton where it can be extended and enhanced without modifying the core product.
This also accelerates innovation as both plugins and the core can develop in parallel.
Creating the AI Summary
BigBlueButton already has a modular recording processing system that supports the creation of multiple recording formats.
For the Paris HackDays, we created a new recording format called transcript.
When transcript processes the captured data from the webinar, it calls Albert, DINUM’s internal LLM, twice. The first time to do a speech-to-text of the meeting. The second time to summarize that text into key points and action items from the meeting.
As a new recording format, it would also automatically appear to users within B3Desk, the open source front-end that DINUM provides to all government employees.
Here is a mockup of how the Docs link would appear in B3Desk, ready for the organizer to access the AI generated summary for further collaboration and subsequent meetings.
For more information
The purpose of our attending Paris HackDays was to support how the open source community can help Europe accelerate towards digital sovereignty.
We believe the integration with docs would make the French government more efficient as well (they held over 151k sessions in the last 12 months).
Interested in learning more? Contact us at commercial support to learn more about how BigBlueButton could benefit your government or organization.
We are ready to help.
(Or invite us to your hack days and we may just show up :-).
