Association News - 25_CW19 - Good bye Skype!

As you all know, the “DMXControl” software project was an online project right from the start - because the “founders” were spread all over Germany. Even when the association was founded, this did not change. For this reason, we made sure at the time that the association was able to exist completely online and was also able to act via the world wide web based on the general regulations. The fact that we were well positioned in this area was proven during the COVID-19 pandemic, for example. While many associations and groups had to deal with the topic of “online meetings” from scratch for the first time, we carried on as before and only had to contend with minor restrictions in our association work. One of these was our annual meeting.

But why are you now reading an article on the topic of how we communicate internally - on the day that Skype is finally being switched off? In this context, we would like to look at our history of how we communicated outside of the forum over the years. It is well known that detailed discussions are better conducted by spoken words than with long texts.

Skype came into play exactly for holding discussions. In the early years, Skype very quickly took an important “place” in our association's work. The project members at the time were able to use it to discuss current topics. Here is an excerpt from the minutes of the project meeting on April 6, 2008 - one of the first to be recorded in our forum:

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Project meeting is taking place today (as usual 7 p.m. on Skype), but I have no urgent topics.

This means that communication via Skype had long been established - even before the forum existed and the minutes of the project meetings were noted there. This is also confirmed by a search in the private archives of the project founders at the time. For a short time, ICQ was still used for a quick exchange. One of the first messages that was sent via ICQ was:

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I thought no device had more than 16, but it doesn't matter, so 256.

Frank and Stefan discussed the number of DMX channels that a DDF for DMXControl 2 should allow.

But at the end of May 2004 - less than a year after Skype was founded and released - Stefan and Frank used Skype for the first time for pure text chat. However, they didn't have their first real conversation until a few weeks later. What is almost taken for granted today - that everyone has a PC microphone or headset - was still not usual back then. The project meeting on June 6, 2004, therefore still had to take place via text messages. On July 4, 2004, the time had finally come: the technical requirements had been met by all those involved and from then on, we spoke via Skype on DMXControl on Sundays. At this time, Skype still existed as an independent company. The takeover by Microsoft did not take place until 2011, so Skype had more or less come onto the market at the right time for us.

The most exciting thing about project meetings via Skype was always the question: who starts the group call? The participants always had to coordinate individually. The functionality with permanently available group chats with defined names that we know from today's messengers did not really exist with Skype at the time. In addition, a lot of poetry and even more individual pictures were initially required when it came to describing and communicating the content of one's own screen to others. This feature was not available until summer 2009. This was also noted in the minutes of a project meeting:

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I have just installed the latest version of Skype (4.1)

Now you can also show the desktop to others.

Maybe this would be useful if Arne wants to show something in Lumos...

We spent many years with Skype in the association. However, it quickly became apparent that the workflow for pure meetings was reaching its limits with the ever-growing project team. A short time later, we started using Teamspeak. However, the tool only really became established in 2015, after meetings had been held with the help of this tool from time to time.

From then on, Teamspeak replaced Skype for our various meetings across the entire team and in the small working groups. What Teamspeak didn't offer, however, was screen sharing. Additional tools were always used here.

Funnily enough, since the final establishment of Teamspeak, there has always been a desire to try out something new. So, we had a look at rocket.chat and Jitsi was also available to us on a trial basis. However, we only made a permanent system change in April 2020. As a result of the lockdown at the time, it quickly became clear that we would probably not be able to hold our annual meeting in person in May 2020. So, we looked around the market to see which video conferencing systems were available. On April 19, 2024, we wrote about this in the minutes of the project meeting:

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Jitsi Meet, BigBlueButton [...], GoToMeeting (more difficult moderation, license required), Discord, ...

It's not really urgently needed. Audio alone was enough until now. It doesn't have to be, for screen sharing or in-between video to show is fine.

[...] has also used other tools at work. But it's more of a professional solution.

Nextcloud probably has problems with more than 4 people.

Zoom is out in terms of data protection

From this analysis, Jitsi and BigBlueButton (BBB for short) were the hot candidates for us. Without talking much, the ongoing project meeting was spontaneously shifted to a Jitsi instance. However, during further testing, BBB gained our increased attention and so we quickly set up our own server for the next project meeting. Although we gave Jitsi another complete try, BBB won the race. This made it possible for us to not only hear but also see each other again for the first time since leaving Skype.

We then used BigBlueButton again for a few years. We quickly came to appreciate various features such as screen transmission, a chat function for participants and a digital whiteboard - not to mention the fact that we could also see each other outside of the annual meetings if we wanted to. The screen sharing in particular also proved to be very helpful in various discussions. Initially, our BBB server was still somewhat independent, but after further improvements, we were later able to start a meeting for the respective team directly from our cloud.

However, the solution with BBB was not to last until today either. After a more extensive update, BBB needed a much more powerful server - and this would have been associated with significantly higher monthly fees. We had previously temporarily increased the server capacity for our virtual annual meetings in order to ensure the effective processing of the larger data volumes through video transmission. However, the smaller expansion stage was sufficient for our regular project meetings. So, after the update, we had to move from project meeting to project meeting. We finally drew the line under our BBB at our annual general meeting at the 2024 annual meeting, where we decided to switch off the server and hold our meetings via Discord from then on.

We had already set up our own Discord server in the spring of 2023, following a corresponding impetus from the community. The switch with our day-to-day business was comparatively easy for us. On the one hand, because many of us were already (also) on Discord anyway. On the other hand, there was now one less system that our IT team had to administer from A to Z. Last but not least, the meetings were more fun again, because Discord still runs more reliably than our own BBB server.

How the story will continue - we will be surprised. But we would like to take this opportunity to thank Skype for supporting us in the early years of our association.

However, there is one aspect that still runs through our communication history today: choosing the right microphone and the right volume. Despite our affinity for technology and PCs, combined with the fact that we hold our meetings regularly, there was and still is the question: “Can you hear me now?”. Even our most experienced meeting participants have been caught out when the audio system (or the internet) goes on strike.

Your DMXControl team