User community estimation

During OpenMeetings project development at Unipro since summer 2011, its commercial support has accumulated rough statistics, allowing to draw conclusions about users and their motivation.

At the moment quantity of downloads from OpenMeetings Apache website has exceeded 120 thousand. What percentage of the technical specialists who have downloaded the server part leaves OpenMeetings as a long-term web conferencing solution for their users, it's difficult to estimate. But even if it is 1 out of 10, there are thousands of installations around the world, each with range of users of 5 to hundreds of people.

Project 5 active mailing lists comprise > 500 subscribers, who generate several hundreds of messages in a month. For example, in 2017 user activity varied from ~ 400 to ~1400 monthly.

The conclusions on types of services and customer categories herein are rather approximate, because of two significant factors. The first is independent installations. In recent years, the installation process of OM server has simplified notably, hence power user can do it on their own from Apache project site.

Customer categories 

Talking about customers, we can roughly divide them into three categories.

Training and teaching entities - here OM is in most demand [1]. The founder of the project, Sebastian Wagner, started by disseminating OM in German universities and integrated it with Moodle learning system, traditionally used by educational institutions. While at the very beginning of the project development these were state universities, now OM clients are mostly private organizations earning on various online training. For example, we integrated OM with several sites for online consultants for school tutors (USA). There are also interesting non-standard examples, for example, the site of the music school for adults in Germany. According to the public Moodle statistics, number of Moodle-based sites using OM is already one thousand [2].

Consulting companies are also related to education topic thus demanding real time communication. In our practice, requesting OM integration are clients engaged in medical online consulting, as well as several law firms that conduct consultations on the Internet.

Multi-site organizations are the third most common type of customers with branches in different cities and even countries [3]. This includes both state structures and non-profit organizations, as well as commercial companies, for example, the bank. Worth to be mentioned is our long-term collaboration with two domestic large clients - All-Russian National Front and Innovation Agency of Voronezh agency. OpenMeetings gained major impetus due to this collaboration which resulted in essential re-design of user interface and functional improvement. We received invaluable experience in the practical use of the system and moderated several hundred meetings. For 3 years we supported 3 customer servers for regular video conferences with participants from different cities. The maximum number of participants in the conference was close to 100. 

References:

[1]        Interações telecolaborativas na aprendizagem de línguas estrangeiras: foco no uso dos recursos do aplicativo computacional Openmeetings, Francisco José Quaresma Figueiredo, Suelene Vaz da Silva; Ilha do Desterro A Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies, 2014, v.0, issue 66, p.133  http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2014n66p133

[2]        Usage statistics for Moodle plugin https://moodle.org/plugins/stats.php?plugin=mod_openmeetings

[3]        OpenMeetings as a browser-based teleconferencing tool for EFDA laboratories, Santos, B; Castro, R; Santos, J H; Gomes, D; Fernandes, H; Sousa, J; Varandas, C A F Fusion Engineering and Design Volume 86, Issues 6–8, October 2011, Pages 1282–1285 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.fusengdes.2011.04.044

 

 

 

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