Manchester Free Software and MadLab are hosting a workshop on Free and Federated Real-Time Communications with Free Software next Monday night, 2 November from 7pm.

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Users and developers are invited to come and discover the opportunities for truly free and secure chat, voice and video with WebRTC, mobile VoIP and the free desktop.

This is an interactive workshop with practical, hands-on opportunities to explore this topic, see what works and what doesn't and learn about troubleshooting techniques to help developers like myself improve the software. This is also a great opportunity for any Java developers who would like to get some exposure to the Android platform.

People wishing to fully participate in all the activities are encouraged to bring a laptop with the Wireshark software and Android tools (especially adb, the command line utility) or if you prefer to focus on WebRTC, have the latest version of Firefox and Chrome installed.

If you are keen to run the DruCall module for WebRTC or your own SIP or XMPP server, you can try setting it up as described in the RTC Quick Start Guide and come along to the workshop with any questions you have.

A workshop near you?

Manchester has a history of great technological innovation, including the first stored program computer and it is a real thrill for me to offer this workshop there.

FSFE Manchester ran a workshop evaluating the performance of free software softphones back in 2012.

Over the coming months, I would like to be able to hold further workshops in other locations to get feedback from people who are trying this technology, including the Lumicall app, JSCommunicator and DruCall. If you are interested in helping organize such an event or you have any other feedback about this topic, please come and discuss it on the Free RTC mailing list.