The system will of coursed be used recursively, right? As in, the current tinychatroom, and soon the program that is developed to replace it, will be used to keep the programming team on-track and motivated?

Well, so far as far as I know only mqrius is working on it and he often does so while being in the room so yes.

Since I fixed this, it seems OpenMeetings is stable. It has been running for at least 10 hours, with at some point 8 people in there, all streaming video. There have been a few notes in the chat which I'll address publically:

I'm not sure if it's a good idea to redirect people here if tinychat is still better until this gets done correctly

Agreed. The redirection today was only for stresstesting it. If it's not stable, putting further effort in it is useless. It turns out it's stable though, so I'll hack some more at it, and see what I can make of it.

is there a way to make the chat part larger?
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bah, this chat window should be nr1 priority to fix

I'll have to edit the source code for it. I haven't been in the source code so far. Difficulty: Easy

I signed up with a username. Why is it not displayed?

It uses the First & Last name as display names. I intend to gut the entire registration form to just ask for username & password, and use the username as a display name. Difficulty: Easy

hm I dont think I can make public rooms

Indeed, only the admin can. However, you can make personal rooms, and then give someone else an invitation link. I can make a few more public rooms, if there's demand for that?

I don't like that the no [chat] notifications part, though

Agreed. I don't know if it's supported. If it's not, I, or the devs, will need to add it. Don't know how difficult that will be.

it is making my computer work a lot harder [compared to tinychat] though

I don't know if that's because there was an unusually large amount of people there, or because the video quality is higher than tinychat. I can put a limit on the video resolution you can select, if people want that. Difficulty: Easy

Confusing webcam selection screen

I mentioned that to the devs 2 days ago, they fixed it the same day, and put out a new release candidate. However, running it, it doesn’t work for me. I’ve just notified them, I expect this to be fixed soon.

Right now, the user experience delta to tinychat is: Login form. Manual resizing of every single video required. Loads of buttons and options to get lost in.
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The barrier to entry is much higher than tinychat.

Login form will be gutted, I'll cap video resolution, and the webcam selection will be simpler. That should get the barrier to entry on a similar level as tinychat, while retaining the potential of multiple public rooms and such.

People are still coming to tinychat, so:

We have moved to mqrius's openmeetings server at least for now. You need to make an account but there is no verification so you can just fill in everything randomly. And please when you register put something in either the 'first name' or 'last name' fields otherwise we will have a bunch of people in the chat with no visible names.

Edit; We are back on tinychat Edit2: Me and a few other users are also currently doing the pomodoros with screensharing on google hangouts

We tried out mqrius' server and encountered a few difficulties, but I have no idea what was causing them, so it could just be that OM is a bit shaky.

I poked around a bit more.
Basically, I got "java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space", so I figured it was a lack of allocated memory and increased the allocated heap space (Xmx and Xms). However, I did some further googling, and apparently the PermGen space is separate from the heap space. If it goes out of memory, it might be caused by either a normal process, or by a memory leak. It might be solved by having java unload its classes. I'm running it with the following flags at the moment:

-Xmx1024m -Xms128m -Xmn512m -Xss512k -XX:+CMSClassUnloadingEnabled -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:MaxPermSize=128m

Since I now applied a fix that might be specific to the problem, it warrants giving it another test.

But honestly, ideally, I should not be the one to test OpenMeetings: I don't have enough knowledge to judge if I'm doing things wrong or if OpenMeetings is. The "fixes" I try are just suggested by random googling, not by careful consideration.

People were using webcams but not voicecomm, even though tinychat supports it. I'm not sure if that's an intentional norm or not.

I'm pretty sure it's intentional. Chatting is just less disruptive when it's only text-based.

If we go with OpenMeetings and have need of a server, that may be of use.

We tried out mqrius' server and encountered a few difficulties, but I have no idea what was causing them, so it could just be that OM is a bit shaky.

Maybe a common room where people can initially talk about what they intend to work on. (Eliezer says: This needs either strong group norms or built-in limits on talk time to avoid becoming a social chat timesink.)

I discussed this a bit with tsakinis, and I think that we can indeed create group norms that do the following:

• Suggest people that are having a (long) discussion to do so in a private room
• Welcome new people, find out what they're working on, and then go off together to do a pomodoro in one of the study rooms

This will mean that someone who joins "just to have a look" will be positively welcomed, and get his first taste of the social work encouragement. The alternative, no lobby room, means that a new person will have to choose between arbitrary study rooms, then "drop in" on people that are working. For someone who's unsure about the entire thing, this doesn't help at all.

For programmers who are curious about OpenMeeting, I've set up a mockup server on my PC. It's is not entirely stock install, I've changed a few configurations to make it more like what we want. No source code changing yet though. You can have a look at it here:
http://forecast.student.utwente.nl:5080/openmeetings/
Go there, wait for a few seconds for it to load, make an account (no verification or anything required), and then you can join the public room. You'll get a popup for video settings: it shows a black screen initially, even though your cam does work when you hit "Start recording test". I've notified the devs that this is very non-intuitive, and they'll be changing it.
Instead of joining the public room, you also have the option to make personal rooms, and invite people in with a link.

My impression about OpenMeetings:
Pros:

• Open source
• Very customizable, because it's open source
• Doesn't require a google account
• It's in active development, with an active mailing list on which people reply quickly
• Easy to limit rooms, get a room overview, and create new rooms

Cons:

• I find the documentation not very intuitive
• It needs a server to run on
• Screensharing is a bit clunky: You can't really use it instead of your webcam, as in google hangout. Should be fine for 1-on-1 video chats though.

Compared to Google hangouts:
Pros:

• Easy to set up
• Doesn't need a server
• Supports screensharing
• Somewhat customizable: It supports widgets, but I'm not sure to what degree the layout is editable.

Cons:

• Needs a google account
• Permanent rooms are a bit of a hack (by creating an event far in the future)

Neither is a clear winner. I'll personally be looking at if it's easy to change the layout on OpenMeetings. If that's doable, then it's already at or beyond the "baseline" level we have with Tinychat.

After testing out google+ hangouts and doing a 2 hour screen share there with CannibalSmith I want to recommend using the hangouts instead of tinychat.

Sharing your screen can be more beneficial than turning your camera on for many reasons - other people can easily see when you are procrastinating (if you are doing work on your computer) and they can scold you immediately. On the other hand when you have your camera on, nobody knows if you are working or just facebooking. relevant post

Sharing your screen however has some obvious disadvantages and it can be more privacy-invading then having your camera on but hey, if you are revealing something personal on your screen then you are probably not working. There are also some cases where screen sharing can be ineffective (for example when your task at hand is to read a book or to do anything not on your computer) but places such as hangouts allow you to easily switch between your camera and screen and provide a ton of other features that can be somewhat useful. In addition to that you can write apps for hangouts which can also be utilized at some point.

As for my ~2 hour screen share with CannibalSmith - it went great, I didn't take a single break in that time nor checked facebook, gmail, skype etc. and I am one of those people that check everything 10+ times an hour.

P.S. I am writing this during a group pomodoro on tinychat because I was too lazy to do it otherwise.

Edit: Of course if there are other applications which we can use that have the option of sharing your screen then that'll probably work well, too.

If people can turn off sounds and notifications, we probably don't have to worry about bothering others by chatting outside of a break. So we could just have a recommendation that you are allowed to chat anytime, but chatting at times HH:25 -- HH:29 and HH:55 -- HH:59 is a Shelling point.

We can encourage this norm by saying "break" and "break over" at the specified time.

Personally I have the sound and notifications off and don't mind the chatting at all, but that also means I ignore the chat while working. I think chatting for introduction and about goals, expectations is crucial and should be limited only if it becomes about non-productive-related stuff.

Perhaps a second room with more or less chat (or other guidelines) will be good if more people join in, but now I think focus should be more on coming up with correct guidelines.