Frequently asked questions
Using eduMEET
Students, lecturers, researchers
The African eduMEET Federation is a distributed infrastructure model providing sovereign, secure, and privacy-respecting video collaboration for NRENs and institutions across Africa.
No. eduMEET runs entirely within your web browser. There are no client applications or plugins to download, install, or update.
Meeting capacity depends on the infrastructure supporting your specific instance, but the federated model allows for robust scaling across distributed media nodes.
For end users like students, lecturers, and researchers, the service is generally provided free of charge by your home institution or NREN.
The federation routes traffic dynamically. If a node fails or reaches maximum load, subsequent participants (or re-connections) are seamlessly routed to a different node in the pool.
For universities
Leaders, IT directors
eduMEET Africa is built for higher education and research institutions that need privacy, control, resilience, and scale without depending on commercial video platforms.
Universities can gain access either by subscribing to the service through their local NREN or by becoming an infrastructure contributor and providing their own server capacity to the pool.
Yes. Participating institutions receive the web conferencing service under their own domain (e.g., edumeet.your-university.edu.ng).
Yes. You maintain your own identity integration and institutional branding on your dedicated eduMEET instance.
Yes, eduMEET integrates with OpenID Connect identity providers (eduID.africa, BonafID, or any eduGAIN-compatible IdP), enabling institutional identity for room management.
For NRENs
The African eduMEET Federation is built on the same core open-source software and architecture, but operates its own sovereign infrastructure and routing dedicated to the African research and education community.
WACREN seeds the federation with media nodes across its backbone, coordinates onboarding, and works with the core team to manage the central infrastructure.
Not necessarily. NRENs can join as 'Service Subscribers' using shared capacity, or as 'Infrastructure Contributors' providing media-node capacity to the shared pool in exchange for slots.
A concurrent slot represents one user connection. Contributions to the infrastructure pool are converted into an entitlement of concurrent slots that you can allocate across your institutions.
Yes. NRENs can contribute infrastructure for a baseline of slots, and subscribe to additional slots to handle excess peak usage.
Contact WACREN's PMO team. We provide a Technical Onboarding guide, an NREN outreach kit, and direct support to get you connected.
Technical
OS and eduMEET software maintenance on media nodes is handled centrally by the core eduMEET team at PCSS, minimizing the administrative burden on your IT staff.
Yes. eduMEET is entirely open-source, developed by and for the global research and education community.
Yes. From day one, all media nodes and management infrastructure are hosted within the community's own networks, ensuring complete data sovereignty and privacy.
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