[SAC] VOIP collaboration / archiving service

[Jo Walsh]

dear SAC,

I've been doing a spot of gonzo software redesign work with blabla, a
voice collaboration service. http://blabla.bountysource.com/ contains
the current svn which is a bit of a mess, it works but its  main
problem is a lot of German is hardcoded in and there isn't a language
model in the backend, so we are fixing that amongst other things.

It is basically a frontend to YATE ( http://yate.null.ro/ ) that
allows you to construct chatrooms like in a MUD that correspond to
topics or physical spaces. Speech events are archived and each
available at a URL and you can filter what you listen to according 
to status in interesting ways.

i think it could be really useful to OSGeo as a replacement for the
conference call service which we are blagging off of ADSK and which is
fine for now but it galls me that nothing gets archived from voice
confs. People often transcribe notes simultaneously into irc so you
would get very cheap reasonably accurate free text search. 

It would be a good environment for a voice-based version of mpg's
ideas for a meeting bot - http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/MeetingBot
and also could be interesting to explore the idea of asynchronous
voice conversations more like irc ones - where messages stack up for
you to listen to and you can leave messages attached to a room or
topic that others can connect to. 

Well, this is starting to get a bit moon-on-a-sticky and just
something which provided a free, logging, self-maintainable voice 
conference service would be a good start. it's not a very short term
proposition as the code needs a significant rewrite, 2/3 thrown away
and the rest sandblasted, before it would be really useful for osgeo.

the internet is a write-only medium for me right now[0], and i'm not in
checking-out-digest mode, but i just wanted to shoot this off at you
lot with an eye to gauging interest. 

cheers,


jo
[0] http://frot.org/devlog/2007/02/07/screen-strain/
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