This is Jitsi Meet, the open source video calling application that the Government uses to prepare for press conferences – Explica

The health crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic it has forced us to adopt new habits. The way of working has changed practically in all areas, we interact in a different way in order to maintain the necessary physical distance, we use new technological solutions and these changes have also come to politics. Especially at the appearances and press conferences, which are now held electronically in empty rooms.

The ones that have given the most to talk about in Spain are the ones that the Government summons daily in the Moncloa Palace so that different positions in the administration, ministers and even the President of the Executive account for the latest data and announcements in relation to COVID-19.

The Government uses two applications when conducting press conferences: Jitsi Meet for the drawing of question times among non-regular journalists and its own solution for asking questions live

And they have had to talk because, until a few days ago, journalists had to ask their questions through a WhatsApp group managed by the Secretary of State for Communication and not live through any technological solution, as was happening at telematic press conferences of opposition parties, which have been using Zoom.

Since this Monday, everything has changed. Yielding to criticism, the Moncloa allows the formulation of questions live through a videoconference system at the appearances of the ministers and the president.

On the one hand, the usual means organize themselves when it comes to articulating the five shifts available to them at each appearance. On the other hand, as explained and shown through a video eldiario.es, the non-habitual media assist through another video conferencing app, Jitsi Meet, to the raffle of five other question turns carried out by the State of Communication Secretariat using the Google random number generator.

Recording of the draw for question shifts published by eldiario.es.

The system that the government uses to connect journalists to press conferences and to ask questions live is offered through a government domain

Subsequently, all the journalists who have been assigned a speaking time are invited to an own government system through which they ask their questions live, seeing their image both in the press room of the Palacio de la Moncloa and on the television signal that It is distributed.

But What is Jitsi Meet like? How is it different from other similar applications? Where does it come from? Is it a true alternative to Zoom, Skype, Hangouts ?

Jitsi Meet is nothing more than a derivative of Jitsi, the parent project, a set of video conferencing, VoIP and instant messaging application projects that began in 2003 as a student project of Emil Ivov.

Over the years and the arrival of both private and institutional support, went from being an experimentation tool to becoming a service maintained by BlueJimp, a company founded by Ivov himself who employed some of the main collaborators in the project. Currently, the Australian software company that acquired BlueJimp in 2015, Atlassian, maintains the project and especially its derivatives, such as Jitsi Meet, with its distribution under the terms of an Apache license and, therefore, being open source.

A recent meeting of the Jitsi team.

The fundamental difference of Jitsi Meet with extremely popular solutions today such as Zoom, beyond being free software, is that no need to install any kind of software or register for the service. We only have to access your web client through the browser and, if we use a mobile phone, we have the possibility of using the applications for Android and iOS.

And what about encryption? Well, something similar happens to the Zoom case. Although group video calls are encrypted in some way, encryption is not end-to-end, the bridging server decrypts the information that is transmitted.

Jitsi also does not offer end-to-end encryption, although it allows us to enable our own computer as a server for greater security.

The difference with other solutions, however, is that Jitsi allows us to enable our own server, which does not mean that we can achieve end-to-end encryption, but we can keep the machine under our direct control in which the data is decrypted. A solution that is not ideal, but it can provide us with greater confidence. Despite everything, since the project they have been working for a long time to improve the technology that they use and that the E2E does not allow.

Looking also at privacy, it should be noted that in Jitsi use Google Analytics to evaluate the use of functions and possible errors, but if we do not generate too much confidence in the possibility that part of our data will reach Mountain View, no matter how minor, there is a code developed by third parties that allows you to deactivate this option from the client that enables our equipment as a server.

Another great attraction of Jitsi Meet is that You do not have any kind of user limit regarding your video calls, so they can have as many participants as desired. It will depend, in any case, on the connections that the server can support and the available bandwidth.

One of the most curious options of Jitsi Meet allows us to count how much each participant has spoken in a video call

Finally, it should be noted that this solution enables both public and private video or voice chat rooms; customize their names, access addresses and interface appearance; and have a phone number to access them by phone. In addition to all this, we have at our disposal a Chrome extension, options such as text chat, blur the background of the image of our camera, ask for the floor with the option that allows us to raise our hands virtually, silence or not the participants and even the possibility of knowing how long each one has spoken.