Wikimedia Meet
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Wikimedia Meet (https://meet.wmcloud.org) is a best-effort videoconferencing system that enables Wikimedians to meet virtually without using commercial services like Zoom or Google Meet. It is part of the ambition for a Wikimedia Social Suite and is an instance of the Jitsi open source software system on Wikimedia Cloud VPS.
This is not a supported platform by WMF, and performance may be questionable at any given moment.
Technical documentation can be found in mediawiki.org. Using Chromium is recommended. It can also be used on a tablet or a smartphone, but it requires the Jitsi Meeting app. With the app, video and audio can be disabled before starting the session (via preferences).
Related issues may be found on Phabricator under the Wikimedia Meet component.
Operation
Jitsi works on most modern browsers for desktop/laptop computers, with Chromium performing the best. It uses WebRTC, so no downloads or plugins are needed. For mobile users, the Jitsi Meet app should be downloaded and in setting, pointed to meet.wmcloud.org. The first time you connect from a browser, the app will be installed and configured automatically.
How to create a meeting?
Creating a meeting requires an account specific to meet.wmcloud.org.
- Ask one of the ticketmasters (listed below) for a one-time-use token that lets you create the account, wait for the reply
- Go to https://meet-auth.wmcloud.org/create,
- Enter a desired username, password and the one-time-use token, and your account will be created.
Your account can either be for you individually, or for a group. Feel free to share the account within a trusted group of Wikimedians, but please don't share credentials publicly.
To invite others, you can simply send the meeting URL. Other participants do not require a user account. But they are requested to set a pseudonym or a name.
List of ticketmasters
If you're willing to be a ticketmaster, let User:Ladsgroup know (This is not the full list)
- User:Ladsgroup
- User:Mahir256
- User:Vermont
- Mehman97
- User:Asaf (WMF)
- 01tonythomas (talk)
- Fuzheado (talk)
- User:Pharos
- Mauricio V. Genta
- Eric Luth
- Majavah
- Saileshpat
- Bodhisattwa (talk)
- Michael, German and English is fine
- Pamputt, français, English
- Abbad: Arabic
Performance
Wikimedia Meet was launched in April 2020, and used for the Wikimedia Remote Hackathon with good success. With 10-15 participants, performance was subjectively on par with Google Meet and Zoom.
An analysis of the Grafana stats panel showed that the load average was below 3.0 and only around 25% of the CPU cycles were being used. About 80 megabits/second were required outgoing from the server, and about 20 megabits/second were required going into the server.
Some basic stats are available in the Jitsi interface if the user moves the pointer over a graph icon. Typically, a user will be sending 720p video at 2-3 megabits/second.
A second test of Jitsi with 13 particpants for the Wikimedians in Residence Network showed similar results.
Given these tests, the Jitsi server should support 25-30 participants fairly comfortably, and should be tested to see if 50 people is realistic.
A presentation was given by Fuzheado on some of the initial stats at the Hackathon (Google slides)
There were problems with a large group in August 2020 when the Wikimedia Clinics/009 tried to use it, and with ~50 participants many of them reported connection issues.