A platform built from the ground up for R&E
International R&E requires the collaboration of researchers who work for different institutions across the world. While many commercial video conferencing solutions do exist, cost, complex procurements, and trustworthiness can be barriers to their adoption within the R&E community. eduMEET was developed precisely to address this gap, as a sovereign solution developed by and for the R&E community: enabling institutions to build a low-cost, easy-to-use video conferencing platform. Importantly, in its latest versions, eduMEET is no longer aimed solely at small and medium-sized groups but can now support large meetings and will soon be available for webinars as well.
eduMEET simplifies real-time communication through a browser-based videoconferencing tool that runs without the need to install any additional clients or plugins – only a web browser and a simple web camera are needed. Its focus on security, privacy, along with being tailored to the needs of NRENs, schools, colleges, universities, research institutions, and performing arts organisations has made it a trusted alternative to commercial platforms across Europe and beyond.
As Bartlomiej Idzikowski (PCSS), eduMEET service owner and coordinator of the spin-out, puts it: “Data security is mission-critical when it comes to academic research data. eduMEET is the solution that best combines the benefits of being on-premise within trusted organisations and having full control, with the agility, ease-of-use and responsiveness of WebRTC.”
A new governance home: the Commons Conservancy
In 2023, GÉANT and the Commons Conservancy joined forces to pilot the transition of eduMEET from a project-developed software to standalone, open-source software external to the project environment – designed to be agile, independent, and community-supported.
Now reaching completion, this governance shift ensures that the platform’s future development will be driven by those who rely on it most.
“NORDUnet is very supportive of the idea of having a videoconference system that is managed by the R&E community in Europe. NORDUnet has a seat on the board and has a PoC running for the Nordic NRENs to test it,” says Erik Kikkenborg (NORDUnet).
eduMEET blooming and flourishing across Europe
eduMEET’s adoption across Europe has been widespread. In Italy, GARR runs GARR Meet as an open national infrastructure combining eduMEET with other open-source solutions. In Poland, PCSS uses eduMEET as its primary tool while also delivering services to the City of Poznań and another organisations. Albanian universities run dedicated instances centrally managed by RASH; Hungary’s Pro-M offers open national instances for R&E, and Germany’s Helmholtz Cloud recently launched ‘Let’s meet!’, a privacy-respecting alternative to commercial tools, built on eduMEET and hosted by the German Cancer Research Centre (DKFZ).
The release of Version 4 in January 2024 marked the coming of age of eduMEET, featuring a rebuilt architecture and a series of innovative features. Among these, there is the ability to use a distributed architecture for a federated collaboration model. In practice, this enables larger online meetings and provides resilience against failures of individual components, which can be replaced by other nodes within the federation.
Enter the eduMEET Federation
Now, a new Proof of Concept (PoC) for the eduMEET Federation is steadily expanding, bringing together a growing group of NRENs and partner organisations to validate a distributed, federated model for scalable and resilient video collaboration.
The current PoC involves ARNES, FCCN, GARR, NORDUnet (providing infrastructure for all five Nordic NRENs), PIONIER/PCSS, Pro-M and URAN. More NRENs and RRENs are expected to join soon. The federation builds on the eduMEET 4.x architecture, redesigned for full scalability, improved performance, a refreshed user experience and new capabilities such as room management, custom domains, custom branding, breakout rooms and federation of videoconferencing resources.
The federation is based on a pool of distributed media nodes contributed by participating NRENs and partners. The service is centrally managed, while audio and video traffic is routed through the most appropriate media node based on geography and current load. If a node becomes unavailable or saturated, users are seamlessly moved to another node, ensuring service continuity.
Each participating NREN or organisation can operate its own tenant with a dedicated domain, SSO or eduGAIN-based identity provider, room administration, user access management, and customised visual branding. This makes the model suitable for both pan-European service delivery and locally branded services under a common federated infrastructure.
The PoC has already delivered impressive results for the federated eduMEET deployment: over 1,500 meetings, over 14,000 connected users, 30 media nodes, and the largest eduMEET meeting counting around 130 participants.
Looking ahead
The PoC is an important step towards offering eduMEET as a scalable, sovereign, privacy-respecting and open-source collaboration service for the R&E community. It combines central operational coordination with locally hosted infrastructure, shared capacity across NRENs, and a participation model that can support both infrastructure contributors and organisations that consume the service without operating their own nodes. Concurrently, the completion of eduMEET’s transition into a community-supported initiative marks a new chapter for eduMEET- one in which the R&E community itself takes the wheel, ensuring that a trusted, sovereign, and privacy-respecting communication tool remains available to researchers, educators, and institutions for years to come.
Institutions and developers interested in joining the eduMEET community can find more information at edumeet.org or contribute via GitHub at github.com/edumeet. Further information on how to join the eduMEET Federation PoC is available at docs.edumeet.eu
