Why eduMEET?

International R&E requires the collaboration of many researchers who work for different institutions and may also be spread geographically. Video Conferencing (VC) is an essential support tool and although many commercial solutions exist, the problems of ease of use, cost, reliability and trustworthiness can be barriers to their use within the R&E community.

R&E needs a low-cost, open and transparent alternative VC solution that requires no special software to operate and can be operated and supported from within the community.

eduMEET is a WebRTC web-conferencing platform, designed and developed within GÉANT project. Comprehensive and transverse approach resulted in set of services, that are supporting each other in order to offer a full value product, in particular:

• WebRTC video conferencing service;
• distributed STUN/TURN infrastructure to overcome firewall and NAT obstacles;
• monitoring, statistics and testing modules to assess the performance of the aforementioned components.

eduMEET was developed for NRENS who wish to create a video conferencing service for their members and also for schools, colleges and universities who want to setup their own video conferencing service. In addition, as an open source software package it is accessible by developers and integrators who wish to build on its capabilities or incorporate it within other more integrated solutions, such as learning management systems, for example. The capability and capacity of eduMEET to satisfactorily support an organisation’s video conferencing needs depends on many factors, including the available network bandwidth, the processing capabilities of the SFU and the end clients, the required resolution and concurrency of the media streams etc. Support for very large and highly distributed meetings is likely to require a distributed mesh of SFU servers to be used, something which is currently under development.

But it is an open source tool which can be used in many different sectors and activities, in particular we can point out four main customer segments which are the most interesting:

• NRENs - as a video conferencing service provider for national research and education societies;
• Research and education society across the EU - main target - as a supporting service in daily work and international research cooperation;
• Art society - easy-to-use collaboration platform for remote education and live art performing;
• Integrators - creators and developers of integrated solutions (e.g. for medicine or education) where the video conferencing tool is an important part of the whole platform (e.g. Moodle).

The main aim of eduMEET is to provide easy to use, secure, and affordable video conferencing platform for the international research, education and art community as an alternative to commercial solutions.

eduMEET simplifies real-time communication and introduces browser based personal conferencing tool that runs without the need to install any additional clients or plugins. Only a web-browser, microphone and simple web-camera are needed to start using the eduMEET service.

eduMEET can support both computer and mobile devices, as long as the webbrowser supports WebRTC.

eduMEET is delivered as software packages in a variety of forms, accessible directly from GitHub or via the eduMEET website, eduMEET.org. These packages can consist of either the source code, packaged versions for various Linux variants or a docker containerised version. There is no centrally accessible operational eduMEET service maintained by GÉANT, however a demonstration service is provided ‘as is’ without warranty, to allow interested organisations to easily evaluate the fittedness of eduMEET for their needs. Organisations wishing to use eduMEET must download and deploy their own instance.

To try eduMEET, visit The eduMEET Demo Service