Hangout Fishbowl
Summary: I built an out-of-band invite tool, for Google's Hangout On Air, based on the Fishbowl discussion format.
Around the beginning of January, I wandered into an online book club utilizing Google Hangouts On Air. The normal attendance was greater than the Google Hangout limit of ten people, so they turned on Hangouts On Air for the people who couldn't get into the discussion. They allocated the nine available slots to first nine to join the Hangout. The rest were left to watch, and chat, amongst themselves, as the Hangout chat and viewer chat are separate. There was always shuffling to get into the Hangout, and a percentage of the group was always left out.
I realized, after some thought, there is a discussion format that allows total group participation and restricts the number of people speaking at any one time. The Fishbowl conversation format could be mapped onto a Hangout On Air. Every Open Spaces conference i've attended has featured a Fishbowl demonstration, but I had never found a use for it. Being optimized for Google+ integration, the Hangout invite system would not work smoothly for swapping in members of the audience dynamically. So, I built the Hangout Fishbowl. (The icon needs as much work as everything else.)
The application is built around two interfaces, a custom site for "viewers" and a Hangout extension for the Hangout On Air broadcaster. This allows a viewer to sign in, with Google+, to the custom site and be seen by the broadcaster, directly invited by the broadcaster, and request an invite to the active Hangout. It is designed to be realtime, so there are no emails, Google+ notifications, or privately shared posts. The broadcaster clicks a link, the viewer gets a popup, and the viewer joins the conversation.
Behind the scenes, the link between the viewer site and the Hangout extension is maintained by a simple Node.js, Socket.IO, and Redis backend.
Currently, the Hangout Fishbowl MVP is a failure. No groups are using it, and the friction involved with using it, on top of Google+ events and Hangouts, is still greater than manually adding people. Perhaps, in a few weeks, I will cycle back to it and iterate on the idea.