Dial-in

[Jeffrey Ollie]

On 2/12/08, Jon Stanley <jonstanley at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Feb 12, 2008 9:42 AM, Jeffrey Ollie <jeff at ocjtech.us> wrote:
>
> > After writing the message last night I dug a bit more into the details
> > of hooking up Asterisk and Flumotion and I definitely think that it'll
> > be possible. I think that combining Asterisk and Flumotion give us the
> > best of both worlds - use Asterisk to bring together the board members
>
> This sort of eliminates the possibility of a "town hall" type meeting
> though (which I thought was the whole point), where there's
> interaction between the Board and the community
>
> Unless questions are accepted via IRC, for instance....but you still
> lose the verbal interaction.  May or may not be a big deal.

Having tens or hundreds of people in an Asterisk conference call would
not be feasible I think.  The management interface for the
conferencing isn't great so it'd be difficult to moderate who has the
floor, etc.  I'd have to look at the code to be sure, but I'm not sure
if the mixing code optimizes out silent frames, and getting various
SIP clients to stop transmitting frame is problematic because many NAT
implementations need the two-way RTP flow to keep the ports open -
Asterisk has RTP  timeouts as well.

If some sort of verbal interaction was desired I think that you'd need
to conduct the meeting more like I've seen various school board and
city council meetings conducted.    All members of the board would be
connected via a SIP client and would have full-duplex audio.  Members
of the general public would be able to listen in on the audio
streaming site.  If someone had something to present or a question to
ask would need to request the floor, probably though a IRC channel.
Once granted permission by the chair of the meeting, you'd be sent a
private SIP URL to connect to which would give you access to the
conference call.  Once your turn at the "microphone" was over the SIP
URL would be disabled.

Yes, this does limit somewhat a more free-flowing discussion, but it
also keeps chaos at bay.

Jeff