The Difference Between Your Project Succeeding or Burning To A Crisp Is Actually You. Dan Jenkins, Founder at Nimble Ape & Director at CommCon Events
This is a fun and insightful presentation. I love Dan’s multiple rants against Zoom, “Zoom is a virus!” It’s entertaining, and done to highlight the scale of the problem open source RTC projects face – the Zoom Effect.
Most developers are short on time, things must be EASY. Dan demonstrates just how easy Jitsi Meet is to set up, not Jitsi video bridge. Almost a one line install, after the download, and follow the installation guide (UI needs to be slick with the noob options as default) to get a fully functional video conferencing service. Personally, I love using the Raspberry Pi, as it’s often just a one line install to get stuff working. In the Open Source Telecom Software survey, this ‘setup problem’ has also been highlighted.
Dan builds on his experience of creating a showcase for Asterisk, with Dana the Stream Gatekeeper. Making it easy to access the new Asterisk REST Interface (ARI) and external media API (to do cool stuff with Asterisk and Dialogflow). There’s lots of great advice packed into this presentation.
Dan’s final comment is left as a question, “do we need an RTC foundation?” To help the open source RTC projects combine forces to close the gap with the Zoom Effect.
Slideshare is having difficulties today, here’s a direct link to Dan’s slides.
Agenda Description
For far too long Open Source projects have been getting in their own way; with no marketing budget to shout the loudest it’s always an uphill battle to get their fair share of the marketplace. But ultimately, we as Open Source project owners and maintainers are the problem.
We need to start thinking about Open Source projects as Products and Services that need to be promoted in their own right. It’s no longer good enough to just have a project website with a wiki and a download link. It’s up to us to sell our love for our creations and make others see the advantages of using them. We need to get out of our own way and show the world what Open Source can do for them and right now we’re failing. Join us to find out what you can do to get out of your own way and succeed.
Thanks for an entertaining presentation 🙂 You highlighted the importance of showing where the open source projects are stronger, for example in end to end encryption, and control over the platform and data. These factors helped Matrix / Element win with the French and German governments. As different groups have needs, e.g. government department versus a supermarket chain, where should open source projects focus?
I was thinking about a response before posting here, and my gut was “oh that’s a difficult one” but ultimately it’s not. If we look at Jitsi Meet or Matrix/Element they haven’t gone above and beyond in showing off those needs of the 10% – instead they’ve shown off a large subset of features that the 90% of users using their projects/products are going to want and enough of them to show the broad capabilities of that project. Concentrate on the 90%, concentrate on showing what will be used again and again and things will fall into place from there.