Comingle Attendance Tracking

Comingle is an open-source online meeting tool, which automatically logs users' behavior (joining/leaving the meeting, joining/leaving rooms, etc.). This standalone command-line tool uses those logs to determine:

• Attendance: How long was each user in the meeting, or at least one room, of the specified date/time ranges?
• Popular topics: Which rooms were the most popular within those same date/time ranges?

One application is measuring attendance in a class. If the class re-uses the same Comingle meeting for several discrete meeting times (classes/events), you specify the start/end time for each such event. This tool measures participation within each event time block, and can output a spreadsheet with a row for each name and a column for each event, where the cell indicates the number of minutes of attendance (currently the number of minutes they are in at least one room).

Configuration

To use this tool, you need to create your own configuration file, say config.coffee (or name it to match your meeting or class). Start from a copy of template.coffee, which describes the various options you can set.

In particular, you should set the server URL, the meeting ID, the meeting secret, and list events that you want to track.

Alternatively, you can use a .js configuration file. In either case, the last expression in this file should evaluate to an object with configuration options.

Do not commit your config file into Git (or change template.coffee), or risk your meeting and its secret leaking to the world.

Running the Script

To run this tool on any machine with NodeJS installed, do one of the following from the command line:

1. Via npx:

   npx comingle-attendance config.coffee

2. Install globally once:

   npm install -g comingle-attendance

   Thereafter use:

   comingle-attendance config.coffee

3. Run from a Git clone:

   git clone https://github.com/edemaine/comingle-attendance.git
   cd comingle-attendance
   npm install
   npm run attendance config.coffee

Tips

If you want to get a list of all of meetings on your Comingle server, so you know where to measure attendance/usage (for overall statistics), run the following command in your Comingle MongoDB shell:

db.log.aggregate([
  {$match: {updated: {$gt: ISODate("2023-01-01")}}}, // recently used meetings
  {$group: {_id: "$meeting"}}, // get set of unique meeting ids
]).map(({_id}) => db.meetings.findOne({_id})) // look up meeting data