WebRTC is one of the most important technologies to hit the web in many years. There is a significant opportunity for WebRTC to help deliver on the promise of the open web—but for communication and collaboration.
But WebRTC needs more Open Web hackers.
Unfortunately, WebRTC is much more complicated than other browser APIs web developers deal with. Thus far, a large portion of the users of WebRTC have not been Open Web hackers.
We have no problem with companies and telcos using and adopting WebRTC, but WebRTC still isn't accessible enough to a community of developers we care so much about: open web devs.
There are several great open source projects that make building with WebRTC easier: peerJS, easyRTC, simpleWebRTC, rtc.io, WebRTC Experiments, and more.
Doing WebRTC very well requires a broad combination of tech expertise that goes beyond abstraction libraries. It's easy enough to put together a WebRTC demo using tools like these, but shipping a real production quality product is no easy task.
All kinds of challenging corners remain. Configuring TURN servers is hard. Having large group video conversations is hard. Native applications are hard. Command and control is hard. And having been designed as a more powerful low-level API, ORTC is going to be even harder for web developers to grasp.
But we strongly believe it shouldn't require a specialized team to build something great with WebRTC.
WebRTC needs better documentation, more easy-to-use tools, and clearer onboarding.
We are grateful for browser vendors work in adopting this ambitious spec. We are grateful for their efforts to interoperate and participate in standards. But we can't rely on them to bridge this gap for us.
The imminent arrival of ORTC and IE support represents a pivotal moment in WebRTC. While this is going to increase complexity in the ecosystem, it's also a chance to get right a lot of what hasn't worked very well so far for WebRTC in terms of empowering web developers to build with it.
We need a community effort that's fully independent from browser vendors to do that. And this effort needs to be openly governed.
We need to embrace players contributing useful technology to the WebRTC ecosystem, and find commonalities and ways to collaborate so we can put less energy toward solved problems and more toward the hard stuff.
A rising tide floats all boats—but the WebRTC sea level is still desperately low.
Here's how we propose raising that level:
- Use an open GitHub repo to organize, discuss, and prioritize efforts.
- Reach out to the web developer community, find out what developers need.
- Set up an event in early 2015 to rapidly speed up discussion and collaboration.
We're calling this effort "WebRTC for the Web" and we're organizing it here.
What do you say? Are you in?
Important note: If you're interested in participating, please propose edits that might make this better representation of your voice, too.