{"id":23791,"date":"2025-06-09T20:17:48","date_gmt":"2025-06-09T20:17:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bigbluebutton.org\/?p=23791"},"modified":"2025-06-10T20:31:58","modified_gmt":"2025-06-10T20:31:58","slug":"bigbluebutton-competes-at-paris-hackdays","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigbluebutton.org\/articles\/bigbluebutton-competes-at-paris-hackdays\/","title":{"rendered":"BigBlueButton competes at Paris HackDays"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The BigBlueButton<\/a> team – represented by Blindside Networks, iMDT, and Mconf – participated in Paris HackDays<\/a>, an open invitation by Direction Interminist\u00e9rielle du Num\u00e9rique<\/a> (DINUM), the Interministerial Directorate for Digital Affairs within the French government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, DINUM offers La Suite<\/em>, an integrated suite of open source tools that help governments be more efficient and work towards achieving digital sovereignty. One of these tools is docs, a Notion-like clone that recently reached number one on Hacker News.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The HackDays was an invitation for open source projects to come together and improve these tools for the French Government, and by extension, all European countries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BigBlueButton has a special place within the French Government as the official State Webinar system<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We of course attended!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"BigBlueButton<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Picture of the BigBlueButton team with St\u00e9phanie Schaer, Directrice interminist\u00e9rielle du num\u00e9rique (yellow lanyard).  Left to right, the BigBlueButton team members were Tiago Jacobs (iMDT), Lucas Zawacki (Mconf), Julia Rathke (Mconf), Guilherme Leme (iMDT), Gustavo Trott (iMDT), and Fred Dixon (Blindside Networks).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Problem<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

For every webinar meeting within the French Government, the problem is capturing, summarizing, and re-using this content from the session.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Common questions include<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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  • Where can I find the attendance list and voting results?<\/em><\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • What were the key outcomes?<\/em><\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • What are the next steps?<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
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    As meetings are recorded, the organizer could manually extract the audio, run it through speech-to-text, and use the text with AI to summarize the meeting minutes into a shared document (or email out) for further collaboration, perhaps to better prepare for the next meeting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    We thought we could do better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    The Solution<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

    Our idea was to embed docs into BigBlueButton and use AI to summarize the meetings.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    First, we broke the problem down into four steps<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    1. We extended the BigBlueButton API so it would also create a new docs document for each meetingID. Since docs doesn\u2019t provide such an API, we used playwright to login to docs, create a new document, and return the URL. That was definitely a hack, but it worked!<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    2. We embedded docs both in a panel and main area in BigBlueButton 3.0 (more on that below).<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    3. We created a new recording format called transcript that both called Albert, DINUM\u2019s internal AI to do speech-to-text and create a summary of the meeting (key points and action items).<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    4. We appended this to the corresponding docs document<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
      <\/div>\n\n\n\n

      Here\u2019s the result in a 1:30 minute video we did for the final pitch on Day 3.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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