[Air-L] non-Zoom platforms....again

[Alexandre Hocquet]

Dear AoIRers,

long time lurker, first time poster*. A recent inquiry to the list 
asking for non-Zoom platforms gave me the idea to ask advice here 
regarding a project for an opinion piece I have about the recent taking 
over of online conferencing by Zoom (and Microsoft Teams)  in Academia.

My point is that the Covid crisis has led (in France at least, and I'm 
willing to have the opinion about academics in other countries) to the 
complete outsourcing to those two corporate platforms for online 
teaching (and scholarly conferencing), which means

1) the renouncement to a once functional dedicated national 
infrastructure (namely, in France, the use of free software Jitsi within 
the state-sponsored "Renater" academic infrastructure)

2) the surrendering of Academia to corporations well known to abuse the 
extraction and commodification of data (Zoom) and well known to 
"embrace, extend and extinguish" anything within their reach (Microsoft)

My point is that it is completely contradictory to a supposed general 
institutional trend towards "open science", and that open software is 
often  forgotten besides open litterature and open data, and that the 
pandemic has accelerated the disintegration of an academic national and 
open infrastructure.

So my questions are :

1) Is anybody aware of an already existing piece expressing that concerns ?

2) Is anybody willing to share what is the situation in their country 
regarding this issue ?

Best,


* for a little background and as a newcomer presentation, I am a 
historian of science and my area is the issue of openness within 
scientific modelling software .




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Alexandre Hocquet
Archives Henri Poincaré & Science History Institute
Alexandre.Hocquet at univ-lorraine.fr
https://www.sciencehistory.org/profile/alexandre-hocquet
https://poincare.univ-lorraine.fr/fr/membre-titulaire/alexandre-hocquet
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