BigBlueButton presentation at WebFWD Summit

Fred Dixon, one of the BigBlueButton developers, has just returned from a three day WebFWD summit at Mozilla's offices in Mountain View, California.

Kudos to Pascal Finette and Diane Bisgeier for putting on a great summit for the WebFWD fellows and giving us many opportunities to learn from Mozilla, each other, and select companies in Silicon Valley how to create successful open source projects.

As part of the summit, each project had to give a presentation on their current status. The presentations were alaphabetical, so BigBlueButton went first. Here's a link to Fred's presentation.

BigBlueButton joins Mozilla's WebFWD program as a Fellow!

WebFWD ("Web Forward") is part of Mozilla's Open Innovation program to support open source projects which help extend the web. As described on their web site:

WebFWD ("Web Forward") is Mozilla's Open Innovation program. We support Open Source projects which extend the Web — providing participants with mentorship from industry experts, access to the Mozilla global network, as well as infrastructure and other world-class resources.

The benefit to BigBlueButton's community is that our project now has one of the most experienced and successful open source companies helping us in our efforts to succeed.  You've actually already seen some results with the integration of popcorn.js into BigBlueButton 0.8 to support HTML5 playback of recorded sessions.

WebFWD's announcement does not change the work ahead: we still need to design, development, test, and release future versions of BigBlueButton that get us closer to our 1.0 goal.  But with Mozilla's help, the road ahead just got a little bit smoother.

See Mozilla's WebFWD announcement for more details.

BigBlueButton 0.8-beta-3 Released

BigBlueButton 0.8-beta-3 is now released, our third beta in the development of BigBlueButton 0.8.

In addition to the usual bug fixes under the hood (see release announcement in the bigbluebutton-dev mailing list), we added a push-to-talk feature in this release so end users can now un-mute/mute themselves if needed.

We encourage anyone interested in BigBlueButton to download and check out this release.