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

[Alexandre Hocquet]

Many thanks for these answers. I should have made clearer in my message 
that some open source conferencing software solutions do exist. Apart 
from Jitsi, Big blue button comes to mind for example. The salient point 
is not really the frontend software itself but the investment in the 
infrastructure to support the bandwidth, something that can be done at 
the local or national level. In France, "rendez vous Renater" was 
working ok until the pandemic but the infrastructure behind it was not 
designed for the sharp increase in use that followed the pandemic. The 
point is that it became easier to outsource to corporations offering the 
necessary bandwidth with their software solutions instead of investing 
in increasing the possibilities of the existing one.

In a similar way, some French universities completely abandoned their 
emailing addresses services provided by Renater because Renater is 
charging for a service that Google provides for free. (And from what I 
saw in my short stay in Philly, that may also be the case for American 
universities).

What is new here, is that it is the pandemic and the sudden and massive 
turn to online conferencing that tore into pieces another possibility of 
providing and maintaining an open infrastructure.

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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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