[Non-Constitutional] Let's get our huddles (aka. video calls) in order

Let’s get our huddles (aka. video calls) in order

Non-Constitutional

Abstract

To adopt Huddle01 Meet as our default video call tool for all DAO calls. The Huddle01 Meet Business plan provides a web3 native video call solution of up to 500 participants per video meeting, unlimited recording storage on IPFS, token-gated DAO meetings only for wallets with the “ARB” token or other tokens, multi-streaming to multiple platforms like X.com, Youtube and Twitch at the same time, and a custom arbitrum.huddle01.app subdomain for $50 USD a month.
The Huddle01 team have been solely building on Arbitrum and as a gesture of support provided by the Arbitrum ecosystem has agreed to provide this service to the Arbitrum DAO for free, for the first 6 months, for us to try it out.

Motivation

Right now, our current system is based on a shared community-run google calendar, and where community members can ask one of the calendar managers to schedule a video call for any initiative in the DAO.

The scheduler needs to provide their own video call URL, which has usually been a Google Meet link, and needs to make sure they have host privileges to that specific video call URL, so that they can accept participants into the meeting and also needs to make sure that they have a paid Google Apps account to be able to record the meeting and host the recording files in their Google Drive and shared them publicly afterwards.

This setup has led to several situations in the past where, either the host of the Google Meet was not able to get into the meeting at the start time of the event and therefor nobody could get into the video call, or the host of the meeting didn’t have a paid Google Apps account and therefor couldn’t record the video call to share with the whole DAO afterwards.

Also, since currently most of the recordings are stored in someone’s Google Apps paid accounts, sometimes those recording don’t have the correct sharing permissions to be publicly accessible and can be lost if the owner of those Google Apps accounts decides to delete them or stop paying for their Google Apps account.

With Huddle01 Meet, we will be able to solve all of these problems, while using an Arbitrum powered and web3 native video call service that uploads recordings straight to IPFS.

Rationale

Huddle01 Meet is the 1st onchain audio/video meeting app built on Huddle01 Network - the 1st DePIN for real-time connectivity, powered by Arbitrum. They are one of the largest DePIN network on Arbitrum which utilises orbit chain and is a top layer3 on Arbitrum. It started in 2020 and is backed by top VCs like Fenbushi Capital, Hashkey Capital, M31 Capital, Protocol Labs and more. With 2000+ nodes already live and more than 100K MBPS of bandwidth contributed on the supply side, the DePIN has also clocked in ~ 8 Million minutes with consistent demand from its own app, “Huddle01 Meet” and a couple of other apps as well.

As you can see, Huddle01 has been mentioned by the x.com official Arbitrum account as one of the best examples of apps building on Arbitrum.

I personally believe that we, delegates in Arbitrum DAO, should be an example of eating our own dog food, and we should be using web3 native and Arbitrum powered apps like Huddle01 Meet.

So, as an experiment, I’ve organized a DAO call last week, using Huddle01 Meet for the coordination of the ETH Bucharest Sponsorship, and the feedback from the delegates that used Huddle01 Meet in that call was quite positive. Here’s the recording of that call.

Specifications

With Huddle01 Meet, we will be able to create a setup where the community-run calendar managers, can easily created an event in the already currently shared Google calendar as they usually do, but then, instead of adding the scheduler provided video call link, they can add a dedicated Huddle01 Meet video call link using the Huddle01 Google Apps extension, with just 1 extra click.

Then we can have several managers of the Arbitrum Business Huddle01 Meet account, that can edit the video call events, add multiple hosts (either with email or wallet), token-gate certain calls, etc.

We can also have an Arbitrum themed arbitrum.huddle01.app page where users can join any Arbitrum DAO Huddle01 Meet Video calls from that can be branded as we like.

Steps to Implement

  1. Buy a business account to reserve the arbitrum subdomain :white_check_mark:
    I’ve took the initiative to purchase the arbitrum.huddle01.app Business account a little more than a month ago, to reserve the subdomain and to test out the Huddle01 Meet app.
  2. Integrate the community-run shared Google calendar by L2Beat, with the Huddle01 Meet Google Apps Extension :hourglass_done:
    This is in progress and I will sync with @Sinkas in ETH Bucharest this week, to figure out all the details in-person.
  3. Test the setup for 2 weeks by transferring the DAOs recurring calls like the Open Discussion of Proposals Governance Call and the GRC - Arbitrum Reporting Governance Call to use a Huddle01 Meet video call link. (This needs to be communicated to a larger audience, here in the forum on the posts for each call, in the delegates telegram private chat, and even on x.com maybe with the @arbitrumdao_gov account).
  4. Schedule all new calls using a Huddle01 Meet link instead of any other video call software, unless specifically required by the scheduler for a reason deemed valid enough by the current community-run shared calendar managers.
  5. SUCCESS!?!? =)

Timeline

Until April 7th – Get social consensus here in the forum to see if there is alignment on moving forward with this idea, and execute step 2 outlined above.
Between April 7th and 22nd – If there’s social consensus, execute step 3 of the implementation steps above to test out the new setup with all delegates in all types of calls already scheduled in the calendar. These 2 weeks should be enough to cover all different calls we do, including the security council election call.
Between April 22nd and 24th – Decide if we should put up to a vote a policy to enforce video calls in Arbitrum DAO to be done via Huddle01 Meet and/or for the recordings of those calls to be stored in IPFS.
On April 24th – If so, create a policy to proceed to a temperature check offchain voting on Snapshot to ratify the decision.
Between April 24th and May 1st – Policy content available for discussion here in the forum
On May 1st – Post the offchain vote on Snapshot.

Overall Cost

Free for the first 6 months, starting April 27th. Then $50 USD a month, and that expense could potentially be paid by the @Arbitrum Foundation, as with the other software subscriptions they already pay for the DAO.

P.S.: I’ve paid from my own pocket, 2 monthly payments from February 27th to March 26th, and from March 27th to April 26th, which can be seen as my personal contribution to try to help with this issue and I expect nothing in return for those. But I wouldn’t mind some DIP Bonus Points for putting up the effort to figure all of this out and for doing this proposal. =)

15 Likes

Paulo bought the business account and approached us with a proposition of using Huddle01 Meet for all the Arbitrum DAO calls. We love the idea and will be making our product team available to listen to your feedback to improve our product according to your needs as a DAO.

At Huddle01, we are avid product and protocol builders and are Arbitrum maxis. Huddle01 Network is DePIN (decentralized physical infrastructure network) built on top of Arbitrum Orbit Chain and Huddle01 Meet is a video conferencing application built on top of this network.

Huddle01 Meet is as scalable as web2 video conferencing applications, is crypto native and has considerably more distribution channels with multi-livestreaming option.

More about how we leverage Arbitrum for our network - Huddle01 dRTC Unveils its L3 on Arbitrum, powered by Caldera - Huddle01 | DePIN for RTC

Please reach out to me for any feedbacks as well on X - https://x.com/ranjan3118

We are really excited to be of service to Arbitrum DAO.

6 Likes

Thanks for taking the time to draft this proposal, @paulofonseca.

I really like the idea of the DAO using products built on Arbitrum and aligning ourselves to support these kinds of projects. If we don’t use them, we’re not demonstrating the commitment we should.

Although I think this might cause some initial friction for new members, I’m in favor of conducting a trial and then evaluating whether we want to continue.

I suggest we create a clear onboarding plan and FAQ so delegates don’t struggle to use it.

Overall, I see no reason not to give Huddle01 a try, especially considering Google Meet can remain as a fallback plan if necessary. Costs are already covered initially and appear negligible if we decide to continue using it beyond the trial period.

5 Likes

haven’t gone into the details. There is indeed a merit in being onchain as a dao by also using onchain tools, and I appreciate this.
My question for @paulofonseca is: have you considered the tradeoff in adding more friction in a system, the governace calls, that are already somehow complex for people to setup and manage (we have plenty of calls in which people can’t enter, or can’t register etc)?
Thinking out loud here more than anything, it could still be worth the effort.

4 Likes

yeah that’s exactly the advantage of this setup. with huddle01 meet any email or wallet address can be a call host. not just the original google account that created the google meet link that might happen to not come to the call on time to let everybody in or record the call. with this setup also any host can record and it goes straight to IPFS

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We used Huddle01 for a while (it was integrated with Meetwith.xyz, our scheduling solution) and had to largely move away from it due to frequent issues (mic/camera compatibility, people struggling to log-in)…

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as I mentioned here, we already did a call using this Huddle01 Meet business account exactly one week ago, and the only non-positive feedback was from @krst because he was forced to download the native mobile app to be able to join the call from an iPhone instead of just being able to join the call from the mobile browser. I relayed that feedback to the Huddle01 team and @ayushranjan and they will fix that soon or maybe already fixed it. everything else went great I believe. we had 10 different people in that call, we can do a bigger test for a call with more people in the next few weeks.

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This is great @paulofonseca - thanks for taking the initiative on this. i’ve used huddle in the past, and besides some minor login/connection issues - it wasn’t the worst experience.

Just to gain more clarity around the proposed timelines here. When does the DAO actually get to test the app for 1 month? From the proposed timelines here it seems that would come after the temp-check vote. Is this correct?

If this is correct, then it makes sense for the temp-check vote to simply approve the 1 month test, then an on-chain vote afterwards to ratify the proposed policy above.

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good points @Chris_Areta I’ve reworked the proposal a little bit. looking at the next calls on the calendar I think we can do a test for 2 weeks only and cover most of the different recurring calls we do.

So here is the revised proposal timeline:

Also, I think we can just ratify this with an offchain vote, if the @Arbitrum Foundation would pay this subscription (like they’ve done before for 10x this amount) so we wouldn’t need to go to an onchain vote and spend funds from the DAOs treasury.

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I like the idea of playing with it.

We don’t need it to be perfect - we need to start using what we already have. Even if the current tools aren’t ideal, real usage will only make it better.

I believe in using Arb tech now and improving it through actual user testing and feedback. Let’s implement what we have, collect real-time user data, and iterate quickly. This approach builds better tools and strengthens our ecosystem simultaneously.

3 Likes

Thanks to @paulofonseca for bringing this proposal, as it encompasses the “eat your own dog food” mindset that each organization should have and aims to solve the common problems regarding call scheduling. Nonetheless, I believe there needs to be a larger testing session, as the DAO, given its decentralized and distributed traits, has in its meetings the main “public square forum” for communicating proposals and breaking down ideas with their authors.

Considering the relevance of this change, I propose a there should be a larger testing period frame, in which there should be an evaluation of the two apps (the tried and true Google Meet, and the new Huddle alternative) at least for a month to compare and evaluate if such a change is necessary and beneficial. In this period, there should be alternate calls using the two alternatives for this evaluation.

While the test recording posted seems clear and @paulofonseca has personally tested it, other delegates including @danielo have presented their experiences with the app, stating that they had to abandon its usage due to the issues that added friction to the process of just attending a meeting, that should be as seamless as possible. As with every app that needs to be implemented into a multitude of users, testing thoroughly is really important, as what is acceptable/good/usable for one cannot be generally translated to others.

1 Like

Hello Paulo, thanks for the effort!

I appreciate the idea of using tools that are Arbitrum-related, as this boosts alignment. As I’m not that familiar with the app, I have a few questions regarding the following point:

  • Will this impact the data collection from @SEEDGov for DIP purposes?
  • It is expected that some will have issues trying to attend those meetings. How to handle that?
  • Some attend the meeting on their mobile phones. @ayushranjan, is the app available in all jurisdictions on App and GooglePlay? Can you confirm that it is possible to join through a mobile phone without needing to download the app?
  • This is a new tool for those who will present things at those meetings. It would be helpful to engage with them before the actual call.
  • What is the plan B? (I assume it is to launch an ad-hoc google meeting, but let’s have it detailed).
  • The change/test must be communicated to a broader audience (using the TG channel, maybe X/Twitter. It would be nice to have this on the execution plan too.

Thanks!

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Thanks Paulo for taking the initiative on this matter. Fully agree we should lead by example and be on the forefront of testing and using decentralized tools built on our own ecosystem.

Regarding the submission for voting, we agree if the Foundation will be covering the costs the policy can be ratified by a Snapshot vote.

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Thanks, @paulofonseca, for proactively proposing a solution to an ongoing problem.

We see the value in Arbitrum DAO using tools built on Arbitrum and fully support such initiatives. However, as mentioned by other delegates, our main concern is accessibility. Because of its novelty, we expect Huddle01 to present a higher barrier to entry compared to Google Meet, which is a widely adopted tool.
We’re in favour of testing the solution and take it from there.

1 Like

Huddle01 provides a .csv with all the attendees for every meeting, and if attendees login with their wallet, it would be even simpler for @SEEDGov to match each delegate in the DIP with the list of attendees. Here is an example of the .csv file from the ETH Bucharest meeting we did.

There are a lot of login options to cater to the most amount of users. There is a Google account login, several wallet connect options, and even a Guest option if we enable it in the settings. In this sense, Huddle01 is more accessible than Google Meet, because Google Meet forces you to login only with a Google account.

here is the iOS app link and the Android app link let’s try it out from as many geographies as possible!

It works in the same way Google Meet does, but it can require some users, especially if they are using MacOS, to restart their browser, to allow huddle01 to have OS level screensharing permissions. So yeah, I agree, presenters should try to share their screen before hand and setup the permissions properly. They would only need to do this once, per browser, on their first time usage of Huddle01, in the same way they would, for using Google Meet the first time.

yeah, good point, we should have a Google Meet ready as backup for every meeting. Maybe L2Beat and @Sinkas could help set this up.

Agree! Will add that to the implementation plan.

2 Likes

gm, great initiative to support Arbitrum builders.
The tool also seems to have very comprehensive features (attendees list, token gating, ecc) that can be useful.

Absolutely in favor.

Only alarming flag is here. Daniel, when did you test it?

We should run a few tests before moving forward.

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This is the first test we already ran:

We should do more test meetings with more attendees in more geographies and on more devices.

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I think its a great initiative going on-chain and we should at least give it a try a few times to see if there are any problems or not so we can seamlessly move away from google meets to huddle.

I would suggest that we create or allow the calls to have both options available for a few weeks (2-4) to be sure everything is working as usual and then switch completely.
That way we won’t have any problems and thats the usual way by migrating from one to another tool.

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Using onchain solutions is an admirable goal for the DAO to aspire to, and we are all for supporting Arbitrum builders. However, the quality issues noted above and the added friction this adds to an already difficult coordination are reasonable concerns.

Can a volunteer working group or entity trial-run this for a few months without a proposal? For example, perhaps the ARDC, Entropy, or L2Beat could volunteer to use this for their office hours and provide feedback before proceeding with a full migration (If they are open to the idea).

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gm @danielo, thanks for sharing your feedback.
Huddle01 Meet integration in meetwith.xyz was an iFrame embed due to which it has some limitationto get access of user mic at browser level for some devices, also based on feedback from that time we have made changes to our platform and tried to make thing smooth for user during login.

Incase of subdomain as it is running as full fledged webapp and not as a embed there are very slight chances of issues related to mic/camera access

4 Likes