Well I just played around a bit with Jitsi Meet but… I have the impression that screen resolution and general image quality/sharpness is not good or reliable enough for a photo editing workshop. Sometimes it’s quite good but sometimes quite blurry.
To be honest I have 0 experience with video conferencing.
You might consider a “follow along” approach, where you post the image you’re going to work, and folks can download it and follow along as you edit, with their own attempt… Then, you’re more dependent on telling them what to do, and less on pointing to it on the screen.
Apparently Jitsi Meet works best with Chrome, image quality is quite usable then.
Well I am still unsure…
If you want to live stream, use OBS to stream and jitsi meet for the audio.
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Definitely a separate solution for streaming your screen. jitsi is to facilitate the collaboration. of course it’s still nowhere close to having people in a single room, but it’s much better than just text based communication.
Thanks for the suggestions and tips.
I have answered the organizers and informed them about my reservations concerning their suggestion.
Well… first, actually I think I’d prefer no live stream but a normal video conference. Second, I think one of the biggest problems is that there is no way of knowing how many people would (like to) participate. Discussion and participation might be a little problem if there are hundreds of participants. Yet discussion with hundreds of people might be better than no discussion at all. Does anybody have experience with something like this?
For the last month, I have been attending a series of web-based presentations that are being held in place of a 5-day conference. Unsurprisingly, the experience is less immersive than a physical conference, but that’s pretty much unavoidable.
Attendees can view the presenter’s screen, and can ask the presenter questions either verbally or via chat. The presenter verbally answers any chat questions. For the first few sessions, most questions were asked verbally, but as time has gone on chat has become the predominant way to ask questions. Chat just works better. It’s hard to know when to throw in a verbal question when you are viewing the speaker’s screen rather than the actual speaker. Multiple people talking over one another is extremely annoying and hard to unscramble. And any attendee with an unmuted microphone can cause unintended disruption, whether it’s a coughing fit, a dog barking, or other people making noise nearby. With questions submitted via chat, the presenter can answer questions when it fits well in the presentation.
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Ok. That’s useful feedback but I think that’s the issue: a workshop or a discussion is not supposed to be a talk or a presentation. Monologue is something that I want to avoid at any cost. I think Jitsi Meet has this “raise your hand”-feature. Doesn’t that work? So this sounds like an online workshop might be a real challenge…
An online workshop would definitely be more challenging than a presentation. To make it understandable, you will need to establish some sort of protocol for how people participate. If there is a “raise your hand” feature, you could use that together with a request that everyone keep their mics muted unless/until their raised hand is acknowledged. Just state the protocol clearly at the start of your workshop, and be prepared to repeat it in case there are any latecomers.
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Also going to hold a workshop (not photography, creative coding) on LGM. I am also currently teaching a photography class (including work reviews, theory, live demonstrations and discussions) digitally. I have also occasionally livestreamed art, and did in person workshops in a variety of settings in past.
First of all, this is totally doable. I use a mix of voice and text depending on students preference, and have the screencast open almost always. Honestly, even only text just works fine. I usually say out loud what is written in text, to give more context to what is being said and encourage people to talk via questions and asking occasionally if there are any questions from them. It depends on the audience through.
Blurry image and relatively low resolution overall is unfortunately a common situation. One solution I found is to keep my screencast area I am working on (e.g. darktable) to a portion on my overall screen that makes sense with what I anticipate to be the quality of the video. This way, I have space to always monitor the text chat. I also have to zoom in any time I am doing detail work, which helps making sure what I transmit is lower resolution friendly. After all, we used to do photography in very low (for today’s standards) resolution screens and it was fine. Less then ideal projectors and screen situations even happen on live events. It is a question of planning how to work around with it and being ready to improvise. 
I hope this helps.
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Due to my personal situation, I will never get to go in person. If the time is right and my internet isn’t laggy (I had a 15s lag in my last zoom meeting where I had to do an interactive presentation! 
), I will try to attend as a visitor virtually.
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@betazoid Have a look to the videos Andy makes about RawTherapee. He’s really good in doing this. Maybe you can get some ideas from his videos 
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TBH then you can directly go to like twitch. stream audio and video in one place and use their text chat for questions.
Well according to the organizers a conference with more than 6 participants does not work well on meet.jit.si, sound and image quality will suffer.
I just gave a one-on-one class on darktable, using Jitsi for screen sharing… Well, even for 2 participants in the same country, it sucks a great deal. Image is quite awful.
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Do we need to deploy a mumble server?
Preferably Big Blue Button, since it’s made for remote teaching. Might also be the opportunity to host classes on a regular basis actually.
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@paperdigits Are you one of the organizers of online LGM2020? Maybe you can communicate with Timothée, who informed me today about the technical issues with Jitsi?
Can we actually make this work (properly)?
Self hosting jitsi requires a lot of bandwidth and optimizations. This is nothing you do quickly. Especially for large crowds.
That’s why I recommend using things like twitch. Where you only have video for the speaker.
For questions you have either text chat or a voice chat in parallel. For making this work all you need is https://obsproject.com/ for sharing your screen.
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