A Twitter Post

These tweets really validate to us that we're headed in the right direction.

We're just finishing 0.63 -- Hope Daem0nX likes this release as well.

On Twitter

Since a blog is more for substantive posts, we've started to tweet on some of the incremental updates to BigBlueButton.

You can follow our tweets at http://twitter.com/bigbluebutton.

Don't worry, you'll still get all the important news on BigBlueButton from this blog. However, if you want to know when we've added a language file for the Netherlands, for example, you'll probably see that in a tweet.

Top 10 Edtech stories of 2009

In his educational blog Dave Cormier picked his top ten Edtech stories of 2009.

BigBlueButton came in at #3.

Thanks Dave, like, no pressure on us now. :-)

We're covered in EdTechTalk

We just listened to an audio broadcast EdTechTalk, a community of educators interested in discussing and learning about the uses of educational technology. They covered BigBlueButton in EdTechWeekly #147. You can hear them talk about the product at about 29:00 minutes into their broadcast.

http://edtechtalk.com/EdTechWeekly147

They were positive in our efforts to provide an integrated setup. They also correctly pointed out that we don't have record and playback in the system yet -- that's coming soon. Right now, we're focused on getting release 0.63 solid and finished. We've got plans for record and playback in the future, but we know from experience that we need to focus on the current release.

If 0.63 is good, then we'll have a solid base for adding record and playback in future iteration.

BigBlueButton 0.62 Released

BigBlueButton 0.62 saw many improvements to desktop sharing. We're proud that it support desktop sharing from mac, pc, and unix systems.

Users will benefit from the faster desktop sharing, and developers will benefit from using the BigBlueButton VM as pre-configured development environment (it’s how we develop BigBlueButton internally).

See release notes for more information on this release and where to download and try it out.

BigBlueButton Sightings!

It's always cool to see other people showing BigBlueButton.

This presentation was made during the Linux Day 2009 in Teramo, Italy. You can see the translated pages here.

The Monthly Release Cycle (or why it's not every two weeks)

The days of a long release cycle are gone.

A year ago, we'd plan this big feature for BigBlueButton, estimate that it would take two months, then end up finishing in four months (twice as long). And while the feature was good, we felt we had somehow missed the mark.

During the past six months, we've released a new version almost every month. This is due to our adopting a more agile development process: two week sprints, daily stand ups, and putting everything in an issue tracking system. The funny part is, we initially wanted to release every two weeks, but we ended up releasing every four weeks (again, twice as long!).

That's OK. In looking closer at our release cycle, our extra effort is a mixture of (a) testing, (b) working on customer-oriented projects for integration of BigBlueButton (which tends to accelerate other features, which is good), and constant refactoring of existing code. All good stuff for a healthy open source project. So, externally, you'll see we now release every month, but internally we are trying to keep our efforts to two week iterations to account for the above.

If you want to see what's planned for our upcoming iteration for this month (October), check the issues tagged for BigBluebutton 0.62 release