BigBlueButton

Web Page: http://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton/wiki/IdeasPage

Mailing List: http://groups.google.com/group/bigbluebutton-dev

BigBlueButton is an open source project for web conferencing aimed primarily at educational institutions. It allows people to share video as well as audio through VoIP, share presentations, chat, and more. It is built on top of over a dozen other open source project and aims to be easy to install, use, extend, and integrate with existing solutions. The project aims to provide a free and open source web conferencing solution that is comparable in quality and features to comercial enterprise solutions.

From the development side, BigBlueButton uses red5 on the server side, as well as Asterisk to help with voice conferencing. The server is written mostly in Java, though some parts are written in Groovy and some are being migrated to Scala for better performance and scalability. The client is written in Flash, though there are plans to eventually change this to HTML5. In fact, two proposed project ideas involve working with HTML5.

BigBlueButton runs on Linux, and we currently maintain packages for Debian and Red Hat compatible Linux distributions, with a Gentoo distribution currently in development. It is also Amazon EC2 compatible out of the box, so you can run your own web conferencing in the cloud. To this end, there are also efforts to make BigBlueButton extremly scalable.

Projects

• Recording a Session Activity and Events The Recording Session module will help for storing all the information that it is generated by the attenders in a Session or Conference. This information will be events like joining, leaving, assignations, presentation activity, and chatting activity. This module will be integrated with Webminer, a project for Archived Web Conference Querying and Intelligent Content Mining empowered by BigBlueButton
• Video-Co-viewing with File Upload , Real Time Chat translation and Feedback Module The proposal is a walk through from my introduction to what are the features I would want to implement in BBB, proposed ideas and how would I go about achieving them, with a very specific time-frame for each.