With Team Building (ping @reef-building) we expressed a need for an online meeting tool that doesn’t glitch on less stable internet connections, that runs for longer than one hour, and one that enables good quality screen sharing.
We also made a suggestion of a proposal to get a Zoom subscription (139 euro per year). Formulated differently: would you object to The Reef getting a Zoom subscription? We acknowledge that it’s not the most benevolent piece of technology, but we really need a solution. TIA!
i am not happy with giving money to zoom but i will not oppose it because i think it’s important that the tools work to do your job and you are happy. just one thing: the subscription should have a time limit. after one year we need to vote again.
having said that, i don’t agree with the critique, I think Jitsi is a great tool for what we need
i am going to put an analogy with a public swimming pool . if there are a lot of people in the pool, the experience sucks. you can swim very slow. better to go to another pool. Jitsi is another public good. somebody out there is freely giving you access to computer resources. if there are a lot of people at the same time running the public good (the jitsi instance) then it’s slow. better to go to another Jitsi instance. the trick here is to have a couple of instances back up. so you move everyone to another link . it sounds complicated but it is not. just send another link in signal.
this is not a jitsi problem. jitsi will ask permission to your browser. you need to agree to allow jitsi to share micro and video
i don’t know what you mean by this. screensharing works marvelous in my own experience
@manuelpueyo has agreed to test OpenTalk, which is the same model as NextCloud: OSS, but not free. We pay a company to run an installation of the software only for us, on their server. Based in the EU (Germany). Also investigating another possibility in the same logic.
Before we move on: NextCloud has its own videocalls functionality. @Lee, have you tried that?
OpenTalk. German, server in the EU, open source tech.
Whereby. American, global network of servers but GDPR compliant, proprietary tech.
So far the differences. The similarities are:
You only need a single account for The Reef, to create the meetings and wield moderator powers. Every other person receives a link, and joins through the browser, no accounts needed.
About 70 EUR/year.
More basic than Zoom or Teams.
Both tests went well. With multiple people on line, the experience was quite seamless. Whereby has a slightly better interface, with features like emoji (though we do have hand gestures in The Reef) and human-readable links like whereby.com/reef-test; also, a slightly better image quality, but this will ultimately depend on connection speed, lighting etc.
Manuel and I think both will do the job, and both are preferable to Zoom. Of the two, OpenTalk is the more ethical (Whereby just wants to be Zoom), and so that is my preference. But of course I will accept any decision.
Once a decision is reached:
Manuel has created free accounts for both services based on cohousing@thereef.brussels. He will share the login data in our login credentials document on NextCloud.
Someone logs in and upgrades the free account to a Pro account (intermediate level), and pays with their own personal credit card (since The Reef has none). The Reef then pays the person back with a bank transfer.
Works?
What tool to you prefer?
I prefer OpenTalk, the ethics are just better
I prefer Whereby, it has nice features and is not Big Tech (yet)
Give me Zoom. Yes, it’s evil and expensive, but it does have corporate level quality
@reef-it has created, and later upgraded, an account with OpenTalk (https://opentalk.eu). You should now be able to hold meetings as long as four hours, with as many as 50 people. Login credentials are in the credentials folder in the Team IT folder on Nextcloud. It should be fairly intuitive.
We have had quite some glitches now where for some reason we couldn’t hear one or more participants. This is quite a nuissance, as we have seen in the online full members meeting and the Q&A.
Could you please look into this, and if needed consider a switch to another tool?
OpenTalk glitched about 7 times during the plenary meeting, until we switched to Zoom.
For me it’s a bit too much to be honest. There’s great value in not using Zoom, and at the same time we also need a tool that doesn’t glitch each and every time.
my take on the issue. just guessing. i think we need to ask every participant to stop video and only speaker show video. i think we are sending too much data to the opentalk server.
other option is to ask the opentalk to send us a bug report to ask what the problem is
I’m no expert on IT, but I would have thought that a company offering the service of mulit-person video calls should be able to provide exactly that. And from a facilitation perspective, the job becomes significantly more difficult if everybody has their camera off…
All good if it’s a fixable bug, as long as we move towards a stable communication format. Last night there was a point where everyone got kicked off the call every 5 minutes. If we have big decisions to take online in the future and that happens, it’ll be unbearable…
I tried to ask around about the state of Zoom/Teams alternatives in 2025. People suggest:
NextCloud Talk. This is a plugin that lives on the NextCloud server. It is already installed in our instance (Manuel and I tested it in 2022), but it will not work well for multi-user calls unless we add to our configuration a high-performance backend. I opened a ticket with TabDigital to ask for pricing and expected performance. Obvious advantage is integration with our NextCloud infrastructure (for example, it integrates with our calendar app on NextCloud). In theory, Talk can replace Signal, as it has a chat (this already works white well), you can download the chat app for your phone, etc.
Whereby. This is a new player, or at least I had not found it when researching video calls before. Based in Norway. It claims to be more stable than Jitsi. Would anyone be willing to test it?
Several people voice for Jitsi, but I believe that is not a good fit for us. Jitsi is mostly meant as an open source software project, that people run on their own servers, and that we can not do. Jitsi As A Service also exists, but it targets medium-sized organizations (starts at 100 EUR per month).
Hi there, been a while!
I’m definitely not a big fan of GAFAM but it’s still worth noting that asbl’s can have a free Microsoft Teams Pro registration, including a number of individual accounts and storage space.
My experience with their videoconferencing is pretty good, in my view more effective than jitsi and definitely more pleasant to use than Zoom.
. if there are a lot of people in the pool, the experience sucks. you can swim very slow. better to go to another pool. Jitsi is another public good. somebody out there is freely giving you access to computer resources. if there are a lot of people at the same time running the public good (the jitsi instance) then it’s slow. better to go to another Jitsi instance. the trick here is to have a couple of instances back up. so you move everyone to another link . it sounds complicated but it is not. just send another link in signal.