BigBlueButton

Contents

How to attend a talk

Talks will be hosted on PyConZA’s very own Big Blue Button (BBB) servers.

  • At the start of each day, links to the BBB rooms for the talks for that day will be posted and pinned to the #announcements channel in Discord and emailed to individual attendees at the email address on their ticket.

  • When you want to watch a talk, click on the link.

  • Please join as “Listen Only” if you’re not a presenter -- that reduces load on the servers.

Please do not share these links to people who have not bought tickets. If someone desperately wants a ticket and cannot afford one, please ask them to email funding@za.pycon.org and we’ll see what we can do.

During the talk, only the presenters can speak, but you’re welcome to ask relevant questions in the BBB chat window and the speaker will answer them at the end if there is time (or whenever the speaker decides to :).

If you encounter problems, please test your set up by going to https://test.webrtc.org/ and then ask in #helpdesk.

How to give a talk

  • If you're a speaker, your should have received login details for out BigBlueButton servers. Please check that you can login to each of the three servers well before your talk (preferably at least 24 hours before). If you have an issue logging in, please contact an organizer straight away.

  • Make sure you have logged into Discord and can see the #speakers channel.

  • Each BBB room will have a session chair looking after it. The list of session chairs will be pinned in #speakers.

  • There is a test BBB room available to speakers. Details for it will be pinned in #speakers. Please do a trial of your setup at least 24 hours before your presentation if possible.

  • Please join the BBB room for your session at least 15 minutes before your talk starts & make contact with your session chair in #speakers.

  • Before your talk, speak to your session chair about how you would like to handle questions. Attendees will be allowed to post questions in the BBB chat window during the talk, but you are welcome to answer them at the end, or to have the session chair select questions for you to answer. When answering a question, please make sure the question has been read out loud so that people listening to the recording later can hear it easily.

  • Just before your talk starts, the session chair will give presenter privileges. From here you can share your slides, your screen or your video as you like -- whatever format works for your talk.

If you encounter any issues, ask in #speakers and we'll to our best to get them resolved quickly.

BBB tutorials

If you'd like to find out all of the many features of BigBlueButton, have a look at the official tutorial videos.

BBB troubleshooting

  • How to turn it off and on again
    • Close the browser page and re-open it using the original link. Reloading the page reconnects to the same session and is not enough to trigger a complete reconnect!
  • How to test on webrtc.org
    • You can test your connection and setup on https://test.webrtc.org/.
    • Testing there helps determine whether the issue is related to PyConZA's BigBlueButton setup. If it works there and not on PyConZA's BBB servers, then it's possibly our fault.