I am a strong proponent of free software. Free as in freedom, not price. Please watch this short video if you have not encountered the notion of free software before. It saddens me that many academic institutions are adopting proprietary software without questioning the implications with regards to the corporatization of academia. The latest addition to this is the adoption of Zoom. This is in spite of the fact that there are free, open source and overall better quality software solutions available: https://jitsi.org and https://bigbluebutton.org. To help spread awareness about the problems associated with using proprietary software such as Zoom, I will collect here links to articles that I came across that point out these problems. Please e-mail me if you notice other sources that highlight these problems. Here is a list of freely available jitsi servers around the world that you can use without creating any account or installing any software. We do not need proprietary software in academia. I am confident that if as academics we do not resist, we will see companies like Zoom profiting from our video lectures, not dissimilar to the way companies like Elsevier are profiting from our manuscripts. They get our manuscripts for free, they get them refereed by us for free, and they sell them back to us for exorbitant amounts. This fraudulent model should not be repeated when it comes to video lectures. We should use video servers set up by our departments or organizations whose role is to provide for academia rather than steal from it.
Jitsi There is a public server of Jitsi that's available at https://meet.jit.si. This is a completely free service and works for small meetings but has a limit of 75 people. You can just go there, create a room by one click completely anonymously. You can then invite people to your room by copying them the web address and your audience will be able to join. If you want a service that will accommodate more people, then you need to set up your own server. I suggest to do this anyway, so that you don't depend on a public server which may get busy during certain times and this way you have complete control over the trajectory of your communications. If you want to engage with the community of people using and fine tuning this wonderful free and open source software, checkout community.jitsi.org. Big Blue Button BBB provides a more advanced platform. It has fancier features such as sharing of slides, polls, breakout rooms and a white board! However, it requires a stronger machine on the server side. Minimum 4 core CPU and 8GB memory is strongly recommended. In return, it demands less from the client machine which is a good thing. I now set this up on a server that I acquired at the Imperial mathematics department. The installation is a bit more involved compared to Jitsi but following the instructions given in installation guide worked fine. This installs a bare minimum and one has to also install a frontend interface called Greenlight for which the instructions are here. We currently have a weekly seminar running on this. Join us at Freemath Seminar. Looks like we are not alone: Finite dimensional algebra seminar MIT classes with free software