Presentation for March NYCBUG meeting on BigBlueButton.

1. Introduction to
BigBlueButton
Dru Lavigne
Community Manager, PC-BSD Project
NYCBUG, March 2, 2011

2. This presentation will discuss:
The origins of BigBlueButton
BigBlueButton's components and features
Installation
Demo of use
How you can help

3. Origins
Educational Development Center at
Carleton University (Ottawa) was expanding
its distance education program
Existing proprietary solution cost ~$3000
per month in licensing fees and did not
meet all of their needs
SCE department head was open source
savvy and knew that components existed--
what was needed was the “glue” to create
an integrated solution

4. Origins
Funding was obtained from the Ministry of
Research and Innovation to create the
solution, initially dubbed TFN-100
First class to use the solution was 09/2007
Spun out as a LGPL licensed open source
project (BigBlueButton) and a commercial
support company (Blindside Networks) in
03/2008

5. Origins
Now available in 17 languages
Used by at least 20 companies in Ottawa as
well as many more companies and
universities across the globe
39 active committers
Over 750 members on developers list

6. Open Source Components
Comprised of 14 components:
ActiveMQ, Asterisk, Asterisk-Java, Flex SDK,
Ghostscript, Grails, Image Magick, MySQL,
Nginx web server, OpenOffice, Red5 flash
server, SWFTools, Tomcat, and Xuggler Java
library

7. Features
● server runs natively on Linux and BSD or
as VMware image
● client is any flash-enabled web browser
on any platform
● upload and share PDF and PPT
presentations
● shared whiteboard
● live chat (public and private)
● shared desktops

8. Features
● can connect through browser or VoIP
● raise hand
● see all participants that are connected
● see and hear other participants through
video
● see the presenter's cursor
● moderator can mute or eject users
● presenter can share their desktop
● moderator can make anyone a presenter

9. Features
● .8 will support record and playback
● integrates into Moodle, Drupal, Sakai,
TikiWiki, eFront, WordPress, Joomla,
RedMine, Foswiki or can run stand-alone
● Matterhorn is working on integration
http://opencast.jira.com/wiki/display/MH/Personal
+Lecture+Capture+with+Big+Blue+Button

10. Installation
Instructions for FreeBSD port are here:
http://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton/wiki
/InstallingBigBlueButtonFreeBSD
Instructions will be updated as package, PBI
and others become available (e.g. pkgsrc?)

11. Demo
BigBlueButton project provides one here:
http://demo.bigbluebutton.org
This presentation will use a temporary
demo here:
66.111.2.183

12. How you can help
Try it out to see if it can act as a
replacement for a current proprietary
solution or to augment your organization's
collaborative communications
Port to pkgsrc, OpenBSD
Give feedback on scalability or tuning
Let us know who is using it

13. Additional Resources
Project website:
http://www.bigbluebutton.org
Support: http://www.blindsidenetworks.com
Installation on FreeBSD/PC-BSD:
http://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton/wiki
/InstallingBigBlueButtonFreeBSD

14. Discussion
URL to slides:
http://www.slideshare.net/dlavigne
/bbb-nycbug
dru@freebsd.org