The New Era of eduMEET: Scalable and Unrivaled Videoconferencing Federation for Academia and Research

2026-07-24

The New Era of eduMEET: Scalable and Unrivaled Videoconferencing Federation for Academia and Research

The open-source videoconferencing platform eduMEET, developed with significant contribution from PCSS, is entering a new phase of development. The primary direction of these changes is the establishment of a pan-European, federated service built on the distributed infrastructure of national research and education networks (NRENs). This solution combines full data sovereignty with unprecedented scalability and reliability.

The eduMEET platform was built from scratch to address the unique needs of the international academic and research & education (R&E) community. Unlike commercial videoconferencing systems, this tool offers full security, flexibility, and browser-based simplicity—with no need to install third-party applications. The project’s transition under the stewardship of The Commons Conservancy foundation cemented its independence and enabled further development driven directly by its user community.

The core pillar of the eduMEET Federation is the eduMEET software starting from version 4.0, tailored and optimized for the distributed architecture of the FeduMEET project (GÉANT Innovation Programme).

In practice, the federated model brings a number of key benefits:

  • Automatic load balancing: Audio and video traffic is automatically routed to the most optimal node based on geographical location and current resource utilization.

  • High fault tolerance (resilience): In the event of overload or unavailability of a specific node, user sessions are seamlessly migrated to other active units within the federation.

  • Local autonomy with global reach: Each participating organization can maintain its own tenant with a dedicated domain, SSO/eduGAIN authentication, and custom branding, while simultaneously leveraging the shared computing power of the entire network.

Pilot testing to date has confirmed the federation’s vast potential: as part of the Proof of Concept (PoC), over 1,500 meetings have already been handled for more than 14,000 connected users across 30 distributed media nodes.

In Poland, eduMEET serves as one of PCSS’s primary communication tools, used among other things to deliver services for the Poznań City Hall and academic partners.

The essence of the federated approach and the priority of data protection are summarized by Bartłomiej Idzikowski from the New Media Department at PCSS:

– Data security is of critical importance when discussing academic research data. eduMEET is the solution that best combines the advantages and full control of on-premise installations in trusted organizations with the flexibility, ease of use, and performance of WebRTC technology.

– An important element of our work was developing a module extending the functionality of the eduMEET videoconferencing platform to support federated login for multi-institutional users,” adds Dr. Eng. Piotr Pawałowski from the Future Internet Services Department at PCSS.

Building the federated eduMEET environment represents a breakthrough step toward a sovereign, digital collaboration space for science, guaranteeing reliability and full control over transmitted information.

Read more about the platform in the article published in CONNECT Magazine, issued by the GÉANT Community.