The first Gardening Club for 2021 is scheduled for Tuesday, February 9th. Register here.
This year, we want to experiment with different formats to see what resonates the most with you, the Zcash community. While there will still be an opportunity to give updates on open source Zcash projects, the main agenda item each month may vary from topical deep dive discussions, technical tutorials or other suggestions from open source Zcash developers.
This month, we have two main agenda items:
ZcashOMG Grants Q&A (5 mins)
We’ll hear a quick update from Holmes Wilson about ZcashOMG, and he’ll be available to answer questions devs have about the grant application process.
ZIP-224 Orchard UX status + Q&A (20 mins)
ECC has proposed Halo on Zcash (aka ZIP-224) as a potential feature for NU5. Nate will give basic high-level overview of ECC efforts plus history lesson w/ Sprout->Sapling era. We’ll discuss the opportunities and challenges of ZIP-224 from the perspective of wallet or light client project developers, focusing largely on usability and adoption. There will also be a Q&A for all attendees who specifically want to ask questions of wallet and light client project devs.
Wallet Creators: Please contact Janie Swingle janie@electriccoin.co if you’d like to join the Discussion.
Everyone: Bring your curiosity and questions for wallet and light client developers about Halo wallet support!
Ethereum Development ( 20 mins) @Souptacular will share some best practices for community development from the Ethereum community.
Zcash Open Source Project Updates (10 mins)
Are you working on a Zcash open-source project? Feel free to share an update and a request. These can be quick informal updates or more prepared presentations as long as they are under 5 minutes each.
Is there a specific reason why you choose to use Zoom for these calls? You might do better with attracting open source contributors, if you use open source software whenever possible. Discord is problematic for the same reasons.
I get this feedback all the time. I would love to switch to a service like Jitsi or Whereby. We have experimented with both. The main benefit of Zoom is that it has the following features built in:
Easy registration process and audience controls (helps manage and discourage any disruptive trolling that might occur)
Automatic reminder emails for people who choose that option
Easy call recording and live-streaming set up
Otherwise, we would have to manage those aspects manually. I am always open to suggestions though if anyone has used an open-source service that provides all those features.
That makes sense if you have a reason to be concerned about disruption. Has that been a problem in the past? If not then why not cross that bridge when we get there?
AFAIK the primary desire right now is to increase participation from potential contributors.
Jitsi has most of the moderation features we would need. My main hang-up is that email reminders and “add to my calendar” buttons really help increase participation and since Jitsi doesn’t have a built-in feature to do that, I would have to do that manually. The integrations they suggest like Google and Slack might also have detractors (I am assuming that someone who doesn’t want to use Zoom for personal/ideological reasons might object to filling out a google form for the same reasons).
All of this is to say,
I hear you. We get this feedback a lot and take it seriously. Keep it coming.
I am always open to exploring alternatives. I’d love if someone built a Jitsi registration plug-in or helped me set one up!
We (ECC) are a small team with limited bandwidth. At the moment, I have found Zoom to be the most useful service for our community calls and video-conferencing needs.
You are right that I and other FOSS proponents have strong objections to Google and Slack.
This sounds like a typical objection in a corporate environment. I believe you if you tell me this would make most people at ECC happy. I can tell you with 100% confidence that Zcash is losing a lot of potential FOSS community contributors because of this mentality.
Why not try Jitsi for a few months without the registration email reminders and “add to my calendar” buttons options? I’m sure you can continue to email your current list of attendees that have already opted in to email updates. Most of the people like me don’t want email reminders anyway. If you take my suggestions I think you can expect increased participation. Some will choose to be on camera, some will use audio only and some will just observe. All of those options should be okay!
What about OBS? it generates subtitles and everything. I dont mind providing you with the filtered audio (compressor) and .srt files - I have fixed my time stamping thing, i hope and people are now different colours.
Then you could use hangouts or whatever and then upload the OBS recording - or direct stream to youtube with a couple of minutes delay.
or get LightWorks - similar but better and costs money.
This is the only difference i can see between zoom and jitsi. - but their might be mod stuff im missing.
Like @buildwithrust said, can we give it a go? I am more than happy to take you through the OBS setup. - Ill stream it via discord if that will help you? (it will also make your mic and others sound 100x better)
About once or twice a year ECC people or other Zcash folks try out jitsi, but each time it seems to fail for at least two or three attendees and/or for meetings with more than 4 or 5 people.
I am always down to try jitsi again or any other open source alternative. To do that well, I’d want a fairly large “practice run” with say 7 or more people showing up for 15-30 minutes to check if it works and see if we can iron out any kinks.
Another angle is that there is some infrastructure and account administration that ECC relies on across multiple meetings, so for ECC to switch to another platform for some meetings but not others is a bit more effort, and we’re super busy. But still, if we find a good platform that’s open source, it works well for most people in large groups, I would see what ECC could do to accommodate that switch-over.
Notice a pernicious issue here: by using zoom we may be excluding folks that we’re not aware of, so this is inadvertantly biasing access to non-open source usage. :-/ I’ve heard of maybe 2 different folks who decided not to participate in video collab throughout the Zcash lifetime specifically because they refused to use proprietary video platforms. :-< Those are typically the kind of activist open source hackers Zcash can always use more of!
At Open Privacy we also went through a period of trying out Jitsi, and even hosted our own Jitsi instance for a while but it always seemed to fall over for larger groups.
At the start of the pandemic we spun up BBB on the suggestion of another research group, and we haven’t looked back - we’ve used it for small team meetings, and larger board meetings. I’ve also seen orgs like Tor use it for their recent State of the Onion demo day meeting and it worked very well for streaming to a large number of people.
There are a number of FOSS projects that I would enjoy making a donation to if they will publish a Z address. Maybe we can discuss which ones we care about the most during the call so we can maximize our impact (perhaps with Gitcoin?). I want to reward projects that integrate shielded transactions with ZEC!
I would love to switch to a service like Jitsi or Whereby. We have experimented with both. The main benefit of Zoom is that it has the following features built in:
