[conspire] How to use jitsi effectively

[Nick Moffitt]

I have run a number of meetings and educational sessions with Jitsi Meet over the past few weeks, and wanted to share my experience here.  

I am using the public service as-is, without self-hosting, for the simple reason that my primary server is in the US, but I and all other participants are in the UK.  Using the public service gets me an endpoint in Dublin, which is essentially local to London from a network latency perspective.  I do hope to migrate my VPS some time soon and set up a jitsi server of my own, simply because that gives me better control of moderator authority in a session.

#	Stick to Chromium, Chrome, and the Android and iOS apps

Jitsi currently has a variety of support for various Web browsers, at present.  Some less-supported browsers can degrade the overall experience if even one participant is using them, so it's best to keep everyone to a particular standard.

Your experience on Safari is likely to be minimal at best (possibly audio-only), but that shouldn't be surprising to anyone who's been keeping up with Safari's IE-like levels of abandonment.

Firefox, alas, has been struggling to implement certain video streaming features:

	https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4758 (which refers to a handful of Firefox bugs in bugzilla)

This means that you're best off if people are running Chromium, but of course Chrome is indistinguishable to your fellow participants.  For some reason the Android app doesn't support the "live-play a youtube video" feature very well, and that's something our music classes use a lot (to provide backing tracks).  I have no experience of the iOS app.

#	Mute, mute, mute!

Make good use of the "people are muted when they join" setting, and be liberal with the "mute everyone else" feature to chair your meetings.  When someone is speaking, it's trivial to lock them into what Audacity refers to as "solo" mode, so that only their sound is broadcast.

If you're expecting many participants, you can also set it to keep camera streams off.  People may then opt to show their faces while they speak, or they may simply share their screen to illustrate their points.  It's just smoother for everyone to have cameras off when you get above a dozen people or so.

#	Raise hands to request the floor

Since you're chairing with the mute feature, it helps to use the "raise hand" feature to request the floor.  People click the button, and you see a blue sigil on their window.  You also get a brief pop-up near the chat window saying that they raised their hand.

One of our participants who is over seventy said he hoped we'd do this via video chat even after the lockdown is over: the one-speaker-at-a-time style coupled with the fact that he had volume control on his own headphones meant he heard far more of what we said than he usually does!

#	Do it illegal-rave style

If you're expecting the public to turn up to a session, it's best to treat it like an illegal warehouse rave.  Don't give out the URL to the actual session, but rather hand out a link to a vetting session.  

Task someone to spend the first half-hour to an hour working with people who join, teaching them the system and making sure their audio isn't going to cause howlround or Firefox-induced lockups.  Also speak to the people who join and see if they're participating in good faith, or if they're troublemakers looking to have a bit of fun griefing.

Once you're happy they're ready, send the link to the real session in the jitsi private message feature.  

I actually have a set of slides at the start of my meeting agendas, quickly explaining the buttons on the bottom of the interface.  It seems most of the folks I meet with are quick studies at this.