bigbluebutton's Introduction

BigBlueButton

BigBlueButton is an open source web conferencing system for distance education.

It supports sharing of slides (PDF and any document readable by OpenOffice), webcams, whiteboard, chat, voice over IP (using FreeSWITCH), and presenter's desktop. It can record and playback sessions (slides, audio, and chat), runs on Mac, Unix, and PC computers, and is supported by a [community of developers] (http://www.bigbluebutton.org/support/) that care about good design and a streamlined user experience.

The use cases for BigBlueButton are

One-to-one on-line tutoring
Small group collaboration
On-line classes (25 or less)

BigBlueButton is built using over [fifteen open source projects] (http://www.bigbluebutton.org/components/).

Getting Started

All the core information is at the [Google Code project page] (http://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton/). Here are a few quick links

If you want to see how BigBlueButton works, check out these two videos

[presenter] (http://www.bigbluebutton.org/videos/)
[viewer] (http://www.bigbluebutton.org/videos/)

After watching the videos, if you want to immediately try out BigBlueButton, the project maintains a live [demo server] (http://demo.bigbluebutton.org) that anyone can join.

To quickly get started running your own BigBlueButton server

[Install on Ubunt 10.04 32-bit or 64-bit] (http://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton/wiki/InstallationUbuntu)
[Download the BigBlueButton 0.80 Virtual Machine] (http://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton/wiki/BigBlueButtonVM)

See also [history of project] (http://www.bigbluebutton.org/history/).

If you like the work we've done with BigBlueButton and would like to contribute back, see [Contribute to BigBlueButton] (http://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton/wiki/FAQ#Contributing_to_BigBlueButton).