1 files changed, 82 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/2019/planning.md b/2019/planning.md
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..ad2b7a34
--- /dev/null
+++ b/2019/planning.md
@@ -0,0 +1,82 @@
+[[!meta title="Planning"]]
+
+The organizers and other volunteers hang out in the `#emacsconf` IRC
+channel on `irc.freenode.net`.  If you would like to get involved and
+help us out with the planning, come by the IRC channel and say hi!
+
+We will be collecting various ideas and plans for organizing the
+conference and adding excerpts from `#emacsconf` logs to this page.
+
+## Current plans for infrastructure
+
+The event will probably be comprised of two main parts: the video-call
+part, and the live-stream part.  We are separating these two, both for
+speed/overhead/bandwidth concerns (if a large number of people decide
+to "join the video-call" to watch), as well as moderation and
+distraction concerns (having to moderate a large number of people in a
+video-call, where only one of them is supposed to be speaking at a
+time).
+
+So, we will use one series of software for the actual video-calls,
+whereby speakers would take turns joining the call and deliver their
+presentation, and another series of software for streaming the
+video-call for everyone else to watch live.
+
+1. *Video-calling:* we currently have two candidates for the
+   video-call software, namely [Jitsi Meet](https://meet.jit.si),
+   [Jami](https://jami.net); under Apache-2.0 and GPLv3+ respectively.
+   I have not yet tried Jami, but Jitsi Meet seems to work fine in
+   Firefox and Trisquel's Abrowser (without LibreJS).  Sadly, Jitsi
+   Meet currently doesn't have explicit license headers on their site,
+   so it seems that LibreJS blocks their JS.  
+
+   I will be opening a bug report for Jitsi Meet asking them to add
+   license information to their hosted version of Jitsi Meet so that
+   LibreJS would allow their JS to run.  If they decide not to, we
+   could try and run a self-hosted instance, though then the challenge
+   would be the inter-continental latency: I'm fairly sure Jitsi
+   Meet's hosted version at meet.jit.si uses an array of servers
+   across the globe to help reduce latency, and that's something that
+   we certainly can't afford if we were to self-host.
+
+2. *Live-streaming:* this is the software most people (i.e. watchers)
+   will be facing.  We will likely use a combination of OBS
+   Studio+Nginx+RTMP to capture the video call, and upload/stream it
+   to our server, where people would then be able to either watch the
+   stream in their web browser (similar to LibrePlanet's embedded
+   video player) or point their media player (such as VLC or mpv)
+   directly to the stream and skip the browser entirely.
+
+   Greg Farough helpfully provided me with a series of [config
+   files](https://git.sr.ht/~ggoes/obs-nginx-rtmp) they had previously
+   used for setting up live-streaming as I described above.  I will be
+   trying to set it up on our (well, my) server and test streaming.
+   Since my server is a fairly small (virtual) machine, I'm thinking
+   of asking the FSF sysadmins to see if they could kindly help out
+   with extra computing power and/or bandwidth on the day of the event
+   if needed.
+
+## Older notes for infrastructure
+
+We need to decide on a good way to host the conference.  An important
+priority here is to use as much Free Software for this as possible,
+ideally 100%.
+
+At the moment, it seems Jitsi Meet is our best bet.  Let's see if we
+can self-host it and if it's usable with limited resources.  If not,
+we might have to use the flagship version hosted at
+<https://meet.jit.si>.
+
+Bandwidth-wise, it seems that Jitsi's videobridge may not be a
+[bottleneck](//old.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/cjam80/emacsconf_2019_call_for_proposals/evd0n8e/).
+It seems using Jitsi could be feasible.
+
+At some point, we should probably contact the admins of meet.jit.si
+and verify that it is okay to run a conference on their site.  We
+should also obviously try it out thoroughly well in advance of the
+conference.
+
+Other candidates?
+
+- maybe ask Nextcloud to sponsor some talk/video hosting?
+- maybe ask the people at <https://streaming.media.ccc.de> for advice?