COSS has published a study on potential open source based online meeting solutions

Municipalities in Finland have voiced a need to map out cost-effective open source based alternatives for well-known proprietary online conferencing systems for the following purposes: online meeting (preferably web-based, no installation), secure file-sharing and collaborative use of documents, chat and messaging, solution that enables online collaboration (easy to facilitate), cloud services, online voting (preferably integrated to the online meeting tool with strong identification method that would enable secret ballot voting). There are several open source based solutions and tools available for each category but a coherent whole is still missing.

COSS launched the “Open online meeting” project last fall 2020 (article published 11.8.2020). The preliminary study phase of the project has now been concluded. As a result from the preliminary study phase a comprehensive comparison list was collected and published. The comparison list includes all different potential open source based solutions that are currently available. Also the study report addresses how these single open source based solutions and tools could be combined to a comprehensive joint solution and researched the technical compatibility between the different open source solutions.

The published study report includes a description of the example solution. The individual open source based solutions and components were selected to the example solution by the following criteria: comprehensiveness of the features, existing integrations between other open source solutions, preferably available hosted and web-based, the amount of localizations (especially Finnish translation), security aspect, size of the community.