Dial-in

[Jeffrey Ollie]

On 2/11/08, Paul W. Frields <stickster at gmail.com> wrote:
> The Board would like to set up a "town hall" style meeting for our first
> meeting in March, if possible.  (The timeline is not strict, but I'd
> like to be able to start telling the community our actual timeline very
> soon.)  We'd like to support call-ins so people can hear the Board's
> meeting publicly.  I have no idea how many people would actually show up
> to listen, but let's assume it's in the 50-100 range, and maybe we're
> nearly right.
>
> Can we support this with our current Asterisk setup in Fedora?

I've been thinking about this a bit and I'm not sure if "pure"
Asterisk is the right tool for this.  The Asterisk conferencing just
isn't very efficient for handling a few talkers and many listeners,
plus Asterisk doesn't always scale well.  What I see is something like
this:

1) Board members use a SIP client to dial into an Asterisk conference
call.  We'll need to make sure that board members have a properly
configured SIP client as well as a decent microphone/headset (built-in
mics on laptops need not apply).

2) Audio from the conference call is fed to a Flumotion (GPL and
already in Fedora) streaming server where the general public can
listen in.  Totem (and plenty of other F/OSS apps in Fedora) should be
able to stream the audio from the Flumotion server directly.  For
those who need to use another OS to listen in we could use Fluendo's
Cortado Java applet (GPL but not yet in Fedora AFAICS).

The key is figuring out how to get the audio from the Asterisk
conference to the Flumotion server, but I'm sure that the Fluendo
folks would be willing to lend a hand on the details.

Jeff