My project group at grad school here actually specializes in ICT & Internet based learning, videoconferencing, etc. We often do support for remote lectures, but we have rather a lot of specialized equipment for it. For point-to-point videoconferencing we have Polycom equipment which is probably out of reach for a non-profit group like Warpstock. For more ad-hoc video meetings we tend to use a mixture of Skype, V-Cube, Google Hangouts, or Opentok.
One of our subprojects is actually trying to develop an open source conferencing system using WebM and WebRTC, but it's still in the early planning stages only.
We often stream (one-way) lectures or presentations, but again, we have specialized equipment to help us. Our most common method is:
- Camera and presenter's computer both connected to a video switcher, which allows us to not only switch between the presenter and the computer desktop, but overlay one on the other, picture-in-picture style.
- Video switcher outputting its stream to a video encoder PC, which in turn streams it to our target URL, which is usually UStream. IIRC the encoder PC actually uses a hardware encoder box, but there are undoubtedly software-only options as well.
- The video is streamed lived on UStream; we sometimes also upload our presenter's slides (if any) to UStream and have someone controlling the online slides in sync with the presenter and the slides on their PC.
- The UStream page has a real-time chat interface which forwards to an IRC channel.
I'm not sure how useful any of this is to Warpstock, given the specialized hardware we use, but at least the general theory might be instructive, somehow.