Who won over the classroom?
As you may know we have worked with the European Commission on a hackathon focused on Jitsi for education. The awards ceremony tool place this past Monday. You may watch it here:
Now that we’ve had some time to reflect, let’s take a look at the winners!
5th prize: Autoscaling Kubernetes Operator
When it comes to deploying software to Kubernetes there are many ways to skin a cat. Community members Pierre Ozoux, Hugo Renard and Timothée Gosselin decided to implement a Kubernetes Operator which would allow anyone with an existing Kubernetes cluster to deploy an autoscaling Jitsi Meet with ease. You can check it out in this repository.
4th prize: Jitas, the Jitsi Assistant
A long time community member Emrah surprised us with a very creative submission. Jitas is at its core a cloud VM you can easily drop into a meeting. In a similar fashion to Jibri, Jitas can join a meeting and facilitate collaboration by injecting basically anything into the meeting, thanks to the screen being shared as video, plus the sound output. It’s basically a multimedia swiss army knife for Jitsi meetings! You can check it out in this repository.
3rd prize: Breakout Rooms
By far the most requested Jitsi Meet feature. A number of external solutions existed, but we proposed integrating breakout rooms into Jitsi Meet as a challenge because delivering the breakout rooms experience fully integrating it into Jitsi Meet can provide a much better experience. Werner Fleischer took on this challenge, solo. His project also made use of the new participants pane as a central point for coordinating breakout rooms. Not only he surprised us a with a great execution, but he has continued working on it after the hackathon ended, and as of right now it even has mobile support! We are very excited to work with Werner and see this one merged. You can follow the progress in this pull request.
2nd prize: Ordered Raised Hands list
Another highly requested feature to complement the raised hands feature is the ability to know “who is next”, that is, to keep an order. Isaac Marco, Ruben Teijeiro and Vassilis Kritharakis took on this challenge and executed it brilliantly. The raised hands information is available at a glance in the (new!) participants pane. We look forward to seeing this feature in Jitsi Meet! You can follow the progress in this pull request.
1st prize: Simple Polls
We’ve had this feature requested many times over. For one reason or another it never achieved the required amount of completeness / maturity to incorporate it into Jitsi Meet. That’s why we were so excited to see the work that the team (Fabien Zucchet, Jade Guiton and Antoine Marras) had done. It ticked all the boxes and we’ll be working close with them to make sure this time it lands in Jitsi Meet! You can follow the progress in this pull request.
Some final words
There were a total of over 150 participants from around 50 different countries who ended up submitting a total of 21 projects. We were very surprised by the high quality of many of them, and this made the judging process very hard!
We are incredibly thankful to the European Commission ISA2 initiative for choosing Jitsi and sponsoring this hackathon, it certainly created many solutions to problems Jitsi was facing in the classroom.