Comment by ffdixon1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ffdixon1 | Hacker News Reader

I am the product manager for BigBlueButton. While we implement most of the capabilities you would expect in a web conferencing system, we focus on giving the instructor many ways to engage students for learning. Being open source has enabled many schools around the world to setup and run their own BigBlueButton servers. Thanks to our community, we're localized in over 25 languages, provide a pure HTML5 interface, and have been deeply integrated into many of the most popular learning management systems. Our road map will continue of focus on the teacher/student engagement. Needless to say, Covid-19 made a lot people take a closer look at BigBlueButton. We've been working on it for 10+ years now, and we're very determined to make it the most effective platform for virtual classrooms and build upon our community.

Thanks so much for giving us BigBlueButton.

Some of the folks in the Debian community have been trying to package it up in Debian and found it a bit challenging that some of the dependencies of BBB work only with specific Ubuntu versions. Would you please help address that and help them move forward with packaging it up and include it in Debian? Thanks again.

We're in the process of moving away from an internal build system for the packaging to having the debian package scripts as part of the repo. This work is underway for BigBlueButton 2.3 (the next version) and beyond. Once we get them released, it's going to be a lot easier for others to build and contribute to the packaging.

Awesome! Thanks.

Cool. A couple of questions:

1. I can see you offer polls and chat, but those are fairly common. What are the teaching specific stuff you think is most interesting?

2. I had a look at the code. I see you're using Meteor. How is your experience with this (I'm a contributor)?

How can someone _subscribe_ to a hosted (by you or someone else) instance for a smallish (~20 participants max) class?

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