[Discuss] Zoom Meeting Alternatives

[Bill Ricker]

On Thu, Aug 20, 2020 at 3:21 PM Shirley Márquez Dúlcey <mark at buttery.org>
wrote:

> Last weekend I helped moderate an online dance conference. As I pointed
> out in my earlier reply, I found the gallery view ("Brady Bunch view")
> valuable as a moderator so I could keep an eye on everybody. Most of the
> attendees also chose that view because being able to see the other people
> dance enhanced their sense of community. So I think there is value to
> having that option available in some contexts.
>

Oh sure, there are contexts where Brady Bunch is valuable ... everybody is
dancing, well yeah.

And I definitely get why in the isolation of this pandemic folks are using
the Brady Bunch mode for community, even when it is objectively the wrong
mode for the ostensible purpose of a meeting.

If there are reasons - e.g. community above - for more people who can
possibly fit on the screen to be streaming video, absolutely yes a
moderator has to monitor all of them.   My point was you the moderator
don't have a need to monitor anyone whose camera is OFF, and the head-end
doesn't have to process video for an OFF camera, and that scales better for
both.
(JITSI does not make that monitoring as easy as it might since it doesn't
group camera-on thumbnails at the top :-/ of the scrolling
BradyBunch/Hollywood Squares. )

(That Zoom scales to 100 video participants ("49 per screen") in comparison
to 30 for Jitsi is amazing; i wonder what they're doing differently in the
head end.)