Hi folks, we're experimenting with Hangout on Air + IRC as a meeting technology that could potentially be used for various WMF gatherings to further open up our communication both with remote staff and the world at large. (For those who don't know, Hangout on Air is a nifty new feature of Google Hangout that lets you broadcast a live YouTube stream of a meeting you're organizing.) As a pilot, we're starting what could potentially become a weekly engineering chat. The first one will be on October 18: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Meetings/2012-10-18 Anyone will be able to join the meeting via IRC to participate and watch the YouTube stream. Sign up if you want, or just join the meeting when it happens. I'd prefer to avoid bikeshedding at this point about the specific technologies, their proprietary/evil nature, etc. - we're giving this combination a try for the first run, and will iterate. the development of open solutions like Apache OpenMeetings and new standards like WebRTC will hopefully lead us to a fully open stack eventually. But this seems like a workable start. If this works well for the tech meeting, we'll likely also use it for the next monthly metrics meeting (those have been recorded on video and can be found here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia_Foundation_Metrics_an… - but participation has only been semi-open due to WebEx limitations.) Cheers, Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate