We're Going To The MonteVideo Tech Summer Camp

(written by Marco Vidonis)

I'm thrilled to announce that Everycast Labs will be taking part to the Monte<video> Tech Summer Camp 2023 organised by Qualabs in Montevideo, Uruguay! The event will take place at Qualabs HQ from the 6th to the 16th of February 2023. I'm looking forward to attending in person; it will be great to meet friends old and new from the community, sharing our experience and collaborating to open source! (And yes, the fact the I'll be leaving the cold behind and fly into the Summer for a couple weeks doesn't hurt...)

We met some of the lovely people from Qualabs at the 2022 Demuxed conference and were immediately captured by the prospect of collaborating with the Video Devs community while experiencing the Uruguayan culture.

During early discussions with the organisers, we all agreed that the experience would be even more engaging if we introduced a few open source projects that all participants can contribute to. In addition, this will open up the event to anyone who can't make it to Uruguay in person, but would still like to interact with the community.

We'll be collaborating on a project to create a new platform built for hybrid and remote events. This will be an alternative to the platforms most commonly used for meetups, that are really meeting tools for which events are more or less an afterthought. The idea is to address, from the get-go, the characteristics that set these kinds of events apart from a regular business meeting, and build specific features for them.

The ideal hybrid events platform should promote live interaction between all participants involved, whether they're speakers or audience, in person or remote. It should start by recognising that each will have a very different experience of the event, and should ideally cater to the specific needs of each. No participant should feel like they're second-class citizens or that they're being left out.

Building the platform will be a chance for everyone involved to experiment, and to imagine and create the features that will make hybrid events a unique experience. We're thinking background music, video overlays, and ice breaker games to promote engagement between remote speakers and audience at the start of the event... but we can't wait to see what people in the community will come up with! This will also be a great chance to learn something new, and for many people, we hope, to get in touch with WebRTC for the first time.

The project will be open source and provider agnostic, so that users should be able to choose whichever WebRTC library they prefer. For example, they might want to use a commercial product such as Mux Spaces, or perhaps host their own Janus SFU.

I spoke about the project at last week's Monte<video> Tech (hybrid!) meetup, where I also listed a few suggestions for what could make great contributions to the project. You can check the talk in the video below:

We at Everycast Labs are really excited to be taking part to the Summer Camp and to engage with the Video Developers community! We believe this is a unique chance to build something innovative and amazing, and to advance WebRTC in the video industry; we can't wait to see what contributions people will bring.

Would you like to be involved and help us with the project, either by joining in person or remotely? Fill this short form to get started.

See you soon in Montevideo!