1. This sounds like a lot of fun, and I would like to participate, but there are two things preventing me.

   I live in PDT land, and it’s either much more early than I want to wake up on a weekend or towards the tail end of the workday on Friday (within work hours).

   During work hours isn’t a big problem except for it being voice. If it were a text chat, for example, IRC, I could probably participate just fine.

   The other thing is Skype.. VoIP is a neat technology and one I have a very large interest in, but being a free service, Skype doesn’t carry the traffic over their own network and is more on the P2P side than the VoIP provider side of things. If you are familiar with NAT (Network Address Translation), Skype uses those who are on non-NAT/non-firewalled connections (such as myself) to provide connectivity in a “supernode” capacity for those who are behind NAT or a firewall that prevents inbound connections (practically every residential customer with a “broadband router”).

   The end result is that Skype uses a very disproportionate amount of bandwidth resources for those using unfiltered connections, in the usual P2P nature (i.e. taking all it can get). At work we’ve seen instances of it using upwards of several gigabytes of transfer per hour when left on at a desktop with a full gig-e path to the Internet, and had to put a policy in place prohibiting its usage, since it used large amounts of bandwidth for content that the user had no direct interest or involvement in (i.e. other peoples’ Skype calls). We could have firewalled things off, but would rather provide as clean and unfiltered a service as possible, and this also technically violates the Skype terms of service.

   The problem is also only getting worse as more and more people firewall off this type of traffic, and Skype starts offering services like video conferencing and file transfer, which use the same path.

   Skype is also proprietary, and you have to use their one client. Not a problem if you have one of the 3 common operating systems (x86 Linux, Windows, Mac OS X), but for example I couldn’t run it at work even if I wanted to (FreeBSD workstation).

   I suppose what I’m trying to say in a very windy fashion is that Skype isn’t really a technology I’m comfortable with using, myself, for both practical and idealogical reasons.

   If you were to ask for my recommendation, I’d say host it in IRC as a text based chat. This has the advantages of being a medium that just about everyone can use regardless of location, latency, bandwidth, or hardware. It also I believe lends itself towards more things being discussed, and makes it easier to keep a record of the conversation or exchange URLs, etc.

   If you like voice chat too much (and I don’t blame you!) I can think of a few good centrally hosted options using standard protocols (SIP, IAX, etc.). They’d probably use about 16 to 64 kbit per user. If you are interested, I’d be more than willing to try to set something up and provide the bandwidth, though I can’t make any guarantees.

   I’m not asking you to change anything! By all accounts it seems like you have a good thing going, so keep on doing it! I’m just offering some input that I hope will be useful.

   Comment by Elf — October 30, 2007 @ 1:39 pm

2. Wow, Elf, I had no idea that Skype worked in that way. It sounds basically parasitic; I can see why it would be unappealing given your setup.

   Peter and I explored a number of options before settling on Skype for its general ease of use and fairly widespread acceptance. We do feel the audio aspect to these conferences is vital, though we do supplement the conference call with a text chat for sharing links, etc. I also plan to start recording portions of the conferences at some point in the future, so that should take care of the need to archive.

   We will probably stick with Skype until the number of participants grows beyond its capabilities, and at that point we are seriously considering Second Life as a future home for the conferences; the ability to enhance conversations with visual aids and an immersive experience seems to appeal to a lot of people we’ve asked. Second Life has both text and voice, and supports streaming of both audio and video. And there’s nothing to stop people from having smaller group discussions if they are so inclined, which is an advantage over one big “party line”.

   I know that can’t be good news, given the wishes you’ve expressed, but for these particular get-togethers this is the kind of direction we’ve had in mind to take things. But you bring up a good point: it would be a VERY good idea to have IRC gatherings as an independent complement to the audio conferences. Perhaps even a dedicated chat area open 24/7 for machinima people. It’s definitely worth looking into, if interest is there.

   Comment by Overman — October 30, 2007 @ 9:42 pm

3. Completely understandable.

   Just a thought — is it possible to add a skypeout call to the conference? (To an 800 number, should be free)

   Comment by Elf — October 31, 2007 @ 1:31 am

4. You know what, we haven’t tried that yet, but theoretically it *should* work. Maybe we can hop on some time before the next conference and try it out?

   Comment by Overman — October 31, 2007 @ 8:42 am

5. Certainly!

   This might solve at least one of the problems very nicely
   I have an 800 number which I can offer conference services via. That way anyone who doesn’t want to or can’t use Skype but has a telephone can just dial in; it only costs me about 2 cents a minute, so it’s no big deal.

   Comment by Elf — October 31, 2007 @ 11:14 am

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