Lessons from an Open Source Business

Fred Dixon, one of the BigBlueButton developers, recently published an article in the Open Source Business Resource titled Lessons from an Open Source Business.

The article reflects on the past three three years of developing and building BigBlueButton, the BigBlueButton ecosystem, and growing a business around providing commercial support for BigBlueButton.

Early days of BigBlueButton

We recently came across this picture of a drawing by Richard Alam made during a presentation on the architecture of BigBlueButton in 2008.




Since then, BigBlueButton has been in active development for over three years, but you can see the familiar pieces of red5, asterisk, pdf2swf and others are still there.

Jeff Miles Reviews BigBlueButton

Jeff Miles recently posted this review of BigBlueButton on his blog. He made lots of good comments on BigBlueButton, but for us this one stood out:

I only ran into a couple problems (audio application freeswitch didn’t install correctly) but the documentation wiki was very helpful in getting those problems resolved. Overall the support resources are excellent.

Writing good documentation isn't easy sometimes, but comments like Jeff's that it worth the effort.

Dean Mantz is happy

Recently Dean Mantz gave a big shout out to the volunteers in the BigBlueButton Setup mailing list for their assistance. Here's an excerpt from his post:

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to those responsible for BBB ... in setting up a brand new server ... I ran into a couple problems. In assisting me, Fred remoted into my Ubuntu server found the issues and had me up and running within 15 minutes....as advertised!

Therefore, if you are having folks question you why BBB and what type of support will be provided they will be quite pleased to know I would place Fred and the BBB family up against any franchise in the business!!

Thanks Dean! We care about making sure people are successful when using BigBlueButton.

BigBlueButton running on Galaxay Tablet

Thanks to filipmares for sharing this pic.

BigBlueButton day in Montréal: March 8th 2011

Developers and enthusiasts of BigBlueButton will meet up in Montréal, Québec, Canada on March 8th, 2011.

This will permit to accelerate the development of the local BigBlueButton community and will be held at the offices of Savoir-faire Linux. Révolution Linux, Gestion-Ressources, Evocatio and AvanTech.net will be present. The event will be 9AM to 5PM EST and topics will include:

• Introductions by Fred Dixon and Denis Zgonjanin- BigBlueButton developers
  
• BigBlueButton Presentation
  
  • Current features
    
  • New features
    
  • Use cases
    
  • Integration with various other applications
    
• Discussion about BigBlueButton business models
  
• Improvements and feature requests
  
• General discussions

This event is the last day of TikiFestConfoo 2011 and just before the Confoo Web Conference, where Tiki will be presented.

Thanks to Marc Laporte, project admin for Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware, for providing the information for this post.

BigBlueButton sighted at ITC eLearning 2011

Fred Dixon (Blindside Networks) and Mario Saenz (Generic Conferencing) recently demonstrated BigBlueButton to members of the Instructional Technology Council eLearning 2011 conference (Feb 19 - 22, St. Pete Beach, Florida).

Members got a preview of the upcoming implementation of Record and Playback in BigBlueButton 0.8.