RFC feedback: "open videoconferencing" proposal

[ronen]

Great that you're taking an RFC approach to this project! I'm writing this proposal as an issue rather than a PR since it doesn't quite fit into the existing RFC doc.

I’d like to propose steering this project towards a broader overall goal: Not only the "world class video conferencing system" as a black box (albeit an open-source one!), but instead creating an “open video conferencing” ecosystem — i.e. open source definitions and building blocks that would support video conferencing that could be embedded in various apps — as well of course as the video conferencing system itself.

For possible applications, imagine things like telemedicine apps or face-to-face customer service portals, where the video chat would be integrated rather than requiring a participant to say the equivalent of “I’ll send you a zoom link”.

That is ideally, there’d be a collection of separate parts, likely each in its own repo:

• The key foundational part: A documented, versioned communication protocol. (This repo could include the protobuf-generated type definitions)
• Front-end communication modules with documented, versioned APIs (that are tied to specific protocol versions)
• Back-end communication modules with documented, versioned APIs (that are tied to specific protocol versions)
• Possibly a separate crate of yew components that provide video conferencing UI widgets
• Of course, the repo that puts it all together into the complete video conferencing system.

I think organizing the project this way would be a great service to the open-source world — and I think it would have the benefit of making it easy for those with expertise in some aspect of the overall problem space to make contributions, and so making it easier for the project to keep growing and improving. And it would open things up to the community creating a growing ecosystem of related tools. (E.g., say, a video player that generates data following the communication protocol so that it can be hooked in as a peer in a conference.) Also it would allow people to build interoperable parts in other languages if they needed to.

Of course in #74 I’ve been working on the front-end communication module aspect, but the suggestion here is to take things to the next level :)

Full disclosure, I’m working on a startup (sorry, no details now — still stealth mode) that will have an app/service with embedded video chat (not telemedicine or customer service :), and I’d love to be able to build on your work and use as much open source as I can! For now I have bandwidth to keep working on this, but I can’t promise how long I’ll be able to keep it up.

What do you think?

[darioalessandro]

Hey @ronen I love this!! this is exactly where we want to be!! I'll make sure to retrofit the RFC with this!!

I'll send you the invite to join the repo as a contributor, thank you so much for your feedback!!