Living Open Source partners with Infratel on video conferencing platform in Zambia
The year 2020 was supposed to be the year the Living Open Source movement became the go to community for everything open source. Unfortunately, life happened, and as with any battles in life, “sometimes you win, sometimes you learn”.
If there is anything worth taking from the experiences of the community this year, is that in the midst of adversity, therein lies opportunity.
The Living Open Source has always worked towards providing technical skills and open source trainings to its members through meet ups and other events within Zambia and Africa. This has not been possible this year, for the obvious reason that we are in a pandemic.
Even though we are sailing uncharted waters, we are still dedicated to providing these trainings to our members. And just like everybody else, we are also transitioning to using video conferencing, but unlike everybody else, we will use our own video conferencing platform.
We are pleased to announce that our successful partnership with Infratel (formerly, Zambia National Data Center, ZNDC), has yielded something worthwhile, something that goes beyond benefiting the LOS community, but the
We are proudly making it official that a video conferencing platform we have been working on in middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, is now functional. We cannot be more proud than to announce that, Infratel made this possible by providing the infrastructure to host this platform. As compared to other existing video conferencing platform which are paid for the likes of Zoom, Meet etc – which have limitations, payments and security concerns – our video conferencing platform is available for free with unlimited hours and unlimited participants.
Some of the features:
Fully secured with end-to-end encryption, screen sharing, YouTube Live streaming, session recording, Live Linux terminal, to mention a few.
As an Open Source movement, we are putting the source code powering this platform on our Github organization, as a way of promoting Open Source. This means that contributions from the community members towards improving the platform are welcome.
Our mission as Living Open Source is to make it possible for us to have locally built Open Source solutions to power our nation in every industry. Most organizations would love to have Open Source solutions, but supporting those solutions usually turns out to be a big issue. Living Open Source is positioning itself to use its diverse community of technology enthusiasts, to provide local support to those institutions that would love to take the open source path and already using Open Source based solutions.
This is the first fruit of the partnership between INFRATEL and Living Open Source Foundation, and because in African culture, the first fruit is shared with family we are sharing this success story with everyone by making this platform accessible to all.
In short, we are all part of one big Open Source family.
https://meetapp.livingopensource.africa/
Source: Living Open Source
