An Open Source Web Conferencing System Copyright 1996-2003, Jan
Wolter and Steve Weiss
backtalk@hvcn.org
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Latest stable release: Backtalk 1.1.23 (Jan 13,
2003).
Latest development release: Backtalk 1.2.7 (Feb 17, 2003).
The words "conferencing system" have been used to describe many different things, so let's clarify what Backtalk is not. First, Backtalk is not a multimedia system. It is primarily text-based. There is limited support for importing images and such, but at it's heart it's primarily a tool to allow people to type text at each other in a structured environment. Second, it is not a real-time chat system. You wouldn't normally expect a response to your postings within minutes. It's more the sort of thing where you post a message, and come back later in the day to see if anyone has responded.
Backtalk is a mature program which has been heavily used at several public sites for more than seven years. In addition to providing a full set of user features, it also includes comprehensive administration tools, documentation and automated installation scripts. It is very efficient and extremely configurable. It is actively supported, with regular new releases still being made.
Backtalk was originally developed for use on two non-profit, public access conferencing systems. HVCN needed a stand-alone web based conferencing system usable both by people with modern browsers and by people with access only to lynx. Grex needed a web interface to its existing Picospan conferences that would run reasonably fast even on their enormously over-burdened machines. Thus, Backtalk was designed to fill some difficult and demanding niches, and to serve wide ranges of users. Since then it has been extended to support even wider ranges of communities, including school-aged children.
A demonstration site is available.
Booktalk is a variation of the Backtalk system developed for the Canton Public Library PULSE system. It designed to be used in schools, with conferences for each classroom under the control of a teacher and all-school conferences shared by all. You can see the original site at http://pulse.cantonpl.org/. Just download the backtalk, bubblegum, and booktalk packages and follow the installation instructions in the booktalk package to install them.
Fronttalk is a command-line front-end to Backtalk. The look and feel is extremely similar to the original Picospan program used on The Well and Grex (which is similar to the command-line version of Yapp used in many places), but the program is actually a specialized web-browser that makes HTTP requests to a Backtalk system to read and post to the conferences. This means that it can be run on any Unix system to access any Backtalk system on the web that supports it. Fronttalk is still somewhat experimental, but it is the only open-source Picospan clone that I know of.
Backtalk is implemented in C. The distributions includes full source, and portable scripts for compiling and installing the system, together with extensive and detailed documentation.
Sites interested in hiring an expert to install and customize a Backtalk system may contact Jan Wolter.
Which features appear in future development releases depends partly on what seems cool to us at the moment that we have a bit of free time to work, and partly on what new features paying customers want to see.
Options to migrate more data into SQL will be added, as will support for additional SQL servers. However the conference content will probably not move to SQL, simply because there is no advantage to doing so. The existing files are well optimized for the specific queries made on that data. An SQL server is designed to process much more general types of queries, and cannot be as heavily optimized for this application as the existing files are. Add the communication overhead and typical difficulties in handling arbitrarily large hunks of text, and it becomes clear that putting conference content in an SQL database is not going to be a win.
New features likely to show up include a facility to allow users to request E-mail notification of new postings to a conference and a threaded interface.
Work on the Spanish-language interface has been halted due to a lack of anyone who wants it.
There is also the HVCN design conference, a public discussion forum where Jan and Steve used to hash out Backtalk design issues. Feel free to join in there, but we have to admit we haven't been using it for a while, because only Jan is doing active development.
backtalk@hvcn.org