Closed Bug 437546 Opened 18 years ago Closed 13 years ago

Should have an IRC bot for interacting with phone conferences

Categories

(mozilla.org Graveyard :: Server Operations: Projects, task, P5)

Product:
mozilla.org Graveyard
Component:
Server Operations: Projects
Type:
task

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
RESOLVED WONTFIX

People

(Reporter: dbaron, Assigned: rtucker)

Details

We should have an IRC bot for interacting with phone conferences, much like the W3C's Zakim IRC bot that interacts with their conference system, described at http://www.w3.org/2001/12/zakim-irc-bot and with source at http://dev.w3.org/2001/sw/zakim/ . I have no idea whether there's stuff there that we could reuse; their system is not Asterisk-based, but rather a customized Compunetix Contex Conferencing system. I think the most useful features are (with some examples from a CSS teleconference, some sanitized): <glazou> Zakim, who's noisy? <Zakim> glazou, listening for 10 seconds I heard sound from the following: fantasai (79%), Daniel_Glazman (26%), Bert (32%) <Bert> zakim, mute me <Zakim> Bert should now be muted (I could also imagine volume adjustment being useful; W3C's bot doesn't have that.) The association of incoming phone numbers to names comes from things like: <Zakim> + +1.760.123.aaaa <johnsmith> zakim, +1.760.123 is johnsmith [ the announcement of a caller joining has the last 4 digits obscured with a unique letter combination; giving any substring of what the announcement gives associates the caller with a name ] or from a prepopulated database. So it can also answer questions like: <plinss> zakim, who is on the phone? <Zakim> On the phone I see dsinger, plinss, Daniel_Glazman, howcome, David_Baron, Bert, jason_cranfordtea, ??P42 but there are a lot more features described in the document.
This would be pretty easy to do. Asterisk 1.4 added a lot of dialplan-based admin commands for the conference system that'd be easy to integrate with a bot. Probably be a few weeks before I get to it though, got a new version of the whole conference system to play with first, and we might get new toys to go with it anyway.
Assignee: nobody → justdave
dave has a lot else going on - perhaps reed could take a look?
Changing QA Contact.
QA Contact: justin → mrz
Priority: -- → P3
Assignee: justdave → dtran
I'll take a look at Zakim source code... can someone fill me in on the specs of our conferencing stuff? justdave, would you be the person for that?
CCing Wilson since he has written some stuff for the asterisk system.
I wrote an Asterisk Gateway Interface library in Ruby that, given a Conference number, can list all participants in a MeetMe conference. Information such as participant phone number / extension, participant Caller ID, muted / unmuted, and duration of participation in the conference are all available, although the original purpose was to open up a channel and dial stuff to turn on the lights. Since the Caller ID is usually present, there should presumably be some sort of smart mapping between IRC nicks and real names. Which we somehow have on the LDAP server, albeit in a very disorganized manner.
For the new tools guy...
Assignee: dtran → cshields
dropping priority here. As I understand it, this bug came out before the web ui dashboard was setup so this is not as much of a need since that is filled, but rather an enhancement if Rob can get to it sometime.
Assignee: cshields → rtucker
Severity: normal → enhancement
Priority: P3 → P5
What Web UI dashboard?
We just had the Firefox Product Meeting with the new SF office and it was a hot mess with folks stumbling over each other with questions from various places in the world. I think a queuing system like raising your hand except via vidyo or irc would be helpful.
One other sort of important note that I probably should have put in comment 0: In W3C, each separate meeting has its own conference code. (We, on the other hand, reuse the same conference codes for multiple meetings.) This makes it much easier to manage the IRC interaction, since the process of setting up the meeting involves configuring the meeting code and the name of the IRC channel (which might be an access-restricted channel) that should be associated with that meeting. I think separate meeting codes for each meeting would probably be necessary for security/privacy and for making things easy to manage (so the IRC bot knows which channel to associate with which call). Fortunately, there's no shortage of integers, so this isn't a problem.
Though we could also just have one meeting code per IRC channel, rather than one meeting code for each recurring meeting. Probably worth thinking about which makes more sense from a resource-booking perspective (e.g., meetings often reserve conference rooms, but should be able to change conference rooms without changing everything else; is there a need to reserve a time slot for a particular IRC channel, e.g., so that there aren't two meetings using #planning at once? Maybe or maybe not...)
I don't understand how we could be expected to have a mapping of phone conference attendees to irc nicknames (which appears illustrated in the original bug report here).. Any thoughts/ideas? I dial in to phone conferences from any one of 3 phones. How is this bot supposed to know that I am <cshields> on irc? What can we get from having a phone bot that does not have such knowledge?
Zakim learns a loose set of bindings based on people dialing in and being tagged as associated with a phone number. He doesn't have a problem with you having multiple phone numbers, and if a number is shared (like an office phone room), it's easy to correct it in a given call. Indeed, w3c calls have a sort of etiquette where part of joining a call is making sure that Zakim knows who you are. Nevertheless, Zakim would be quite useful even without the solving the phone-to-irc binding. Zakim logs channel traffic, produces meeting notes, manages question queues, records action items people commit to -- all through simple IRC interactions. I'd take it tomorrow even if it knew nothing at all about the phone system.
(In reply to Johnathan Nightingale [:johnath] from comment #15) > Zakim logs channel traffic, produces meeting notes, > manages question queues, records action items people commit to -- all > through simple IRC interactions. I'd take it tomorrow even if it knew > nothing at all about the phone system. Actually, those things (other than managing question queues) are the W3C's other bots, RRSAgent and trackbot.
Nurts. It would be scope creep to ask for those, too.
Wontfixing this. We don't currently have resources for this.
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 13 years ago
Resolution: --- → WONTFIX
Product: mozilla.org → mozilla.org Graveyard
You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.