About the Foundation for Public Code

Jitsi Meet

This resource

Contents

  1. Using Jitsi Meet
  2. Jitsi Meet for our community
  3. Jitsi management
  4. Jitsi customization
  5. Privacy and GDPR

Contribute on GitHub

Jitsi Meet is our videocall and conference tool.

The information on this page does not cover meet.na.publiccode.net instance, but rather the former meet.publiccode.net instance.

Jitsi is an open source project that allows us to deploy secure video conferencing solutions. At the heart of Jitsi are Jitsi Videobridge and Jitsi Meet, which lets us have conferences on the internet, while other projects in the community enable other features such as audio, dial-in, recording, and simulcasting.

Using Jitsi Meet

  • Jitsi Meet can be reached on ‘meet.publiccode.net’.
  • All team members can create rooms. The link to the room can be shared publicly or secretly, depending on the purpose of the meeting.
  • The first person to create a room or enters an existing room is the host and is required to authenticate by entering their log-in credentials.
  • Guests can join the meeting when the have the link. As an extra security measure a password can be added to the room, so guests also need the password next to the meeting link.

Jitsi Meet for our community

We used to host a Jitsi instance running for our community. Users could sign up for an account so they could host meetings themselves. We have a user and administrator guide available.

Jitsi management

Jitsi is running on a VPS with 8 GB of RAM for resilience and scalability. The VPS is maintained by the operations coordinator who also takes care of user administration and customizations.

The internal meet.publiccode.net system is configured with Ubuntu LTS, with the following additions:

/etc/apt/sources.list.d/jitsi-stable.list
/etc/apt/sources.list.d/prosody.list

SSH keys are needed to perform updates, as one needs to access the machines as root. Log into the machine via the command line with:

Jitsi internal: ssh root@meet.publiccode.net

The following commands perform general updates and upgrades:

apt update

apt upgrade

When that is ready the following commands need to be applied to reboot the machine:

systemctl restart prosody.service

systemctl restart jicofo.service

systemctl restart jitsi-videobridge2.service

If you need to make tweaks to the configuration files, then these can be accessed via:

nano /etc/jitsi/meet/meet.publiccode.net-config.js

nano /etc/jitsi/jicofo/sip-communicator.properties

nano /etc/prosody/conf.avail/meet.publiccode.net.cfg.lua

nano /usr/share/jitsi-meet/interface_config.js

If you are making changes or updates to the Jitsi Community configuration meet.publiccode.net needs to be replaced with meet.community.publiccode.net

On the internal server, Prosody is used for creating and managing user accounts.

ls -l /var/lib/prosody/*/accounts/*

Accounts can be created from the commandline:

register ${NEW_USER_NAME} meet.publiccode.net $(random-string)
cat /var/lib/prosody/meet%2epubliccode%2enet/accounts/${NEW_USER_NAME}.dat

On the meet.community.publiccode.net server, accounts were created and managed with publiccodenet/jitsi-community as described in jitsi-guides.

Jitsi customization

Jitsi can be customized for a more personalized experience. The logo points to our brand website.

We added our logo to our Jitsi instances

and can be added here:nano /usr/share/jitsi-meet/interface_config.js.

We also renamed ‘fellow Jitser’ to ‘fellow Public Coder’ for people joining our meetings.

Privacy and GDPR

8x8’s Privacy Supplement describes what personal information 8×8 processes for the meet.jit.si video meeting service and why.

We believe use of Jitsi Meet has no GDPR implications.