As we build up systems at the Initiative for Literacy in a Digital Age, digital connection is not a convenience. It’s infrastructure. But we made a conscious choice early on. We didn’t want our work to live in the “borrowed” spaces of our day jobs. No university-issued Zoom accounts, no corporate OneDrive folders, and no institutional email. We needed a space that belonged to the initiative itself.
Nowhere was this more critical than in our choice of video conferencing. The connective tissue that binds our work together across time zones and community conversations. For years, like most organizations, we relied on large commercial platforms because they are familiar and polished. My institution even provides an enterprise Zoom license, which would have made this decision simple.
But simple isn’t the same as aligned.
Why We Didn’t Use Institutional Zoom
Choosing not to use our institutional Zoom wasn’t about technical shortcomings. Zoom works well. The issue is structural and ethical.
As I’ve noted in previous posts, the “default” tools of the modern web are often designed to extract as much value and data from the user as possible. When we built the systems for the Initiative for Literacy in a Digital Age , we knew we couldn’t just use the institutional Zoom, OneDrive, or Google Drive accounts provided by our day jobs.
Relying on an institutional Zoom license would mean:
- Governed by Corporate Data Policies: Our interactions would be subject to institutional oversight rather than community values.
- Metadata Extraction: Participant data would flow directly into corporate and institutional analytics systems, the data collection and profiling we are trying to resist.
- A Rented Reality: Even with recordings off, Zoom remains a rented space where governance is centralized, and participants have no meaningful choice.
If we are serious about teaching digital literacy, equity, and agency, our tools must model those commitments. Digital solidarity means not asking our community to trade their autonomy for our convenience.
Beyond Convenience: Viewing Friction as a Feature
We don’t just talk about digital literacy. We practice it by refusing to trade community autonomy for “easy” enterprise logins.
Our work is grounded in the principles of privacy by design, community governance, and digital solidarity. Using an institutional Zoom would have been the “simple” path, but it would have compromised our core principles in the following ways:
- Breaking the Data Flow: Instead of letting participant metadata vanish into corporate “black boxes,” we wanted to ensure that data stays within our community.
- Consent Over Compliance: We refuse to ask community members to enter spaces they did not consent to or cannot control.
- Infrastructure as Pedagogy: Running our own platform requires more work. But as we’ve discussed before, that friction is a feature, not a bug. It is a necessary step in reclaiming our digital spaces.
If we are serious about teaching digital literacy, equity, and agency, then the tools we use must model those commitments. Digital solidarity means not asking our community to trade their data and autonomy for our convenience. One where data flows outward, governance is centralized, and participants have little meaningful choice.
Yes, running our own platform requires more work. That friction is part of the point.
Enter Jitsi Meet
Jitsi Meet is an open-source video conferencing platform. Think of it as the community-owned cousin of Zoom or Google Meet. It runs directly in the browser, requires no participant accounts, and supports encrypted video conferencing out of the box.
You can test drive it for free here. You can also pay for a hosted version (a company runs it for you) here.
Most importantly, because Jitsi is open source, it can be self-hosted. That single fact changes everything.
Self-hosting means:
- Privacy: Audio, video, and metadata flow through our server, not a corporate black box
- Agency: We decide how meetings are run, logged, secured, or not recorded
- Transparency: The software is inspectable, auditable, and community-maintained
- Respect: Participants are not required to agree to third-party surveillance capitalism just to show up
We also gain something surprisingly meaningful, a sense of identity. Instead of sending people to a generic meeting link, we invite them to videochat.initiativeforliteracy.org. A space that clearly belongs to the community they’re joining.
Meetings are ephemeral, not indexed, and hosted on infrastructure we control. Participation does not require an account, and no meeting data is retained by third-party platforms.
Finding a Host That Matches Our Values
Running a video server requires reliable infrastructure, and we didn’t want to build this from scratch. We chose Reclaim Cloud, a platform that supports container-based hosting and aligns closely with the values of openness, experimentation, and educational ownership.
Reclaim Cloud offers a one-click Jitsi installer that handles most of the complexity while still allowing full control under the hood. That balance, access without abstraction, is rare and deeply appreciated.
I’ll explain more of this in upcoming posts.
Our First Real Test
We recently ran three hours of back-to-back meetings with multiple groups.
The result? Seamless.
Participants clicked a link, typed their name, and joined. No accounts, no downloads, no friction. The video quality was excellent, screen sharing worked reliably, and the chat function performed better than Zoom. The experience felt indistinguishable from commercial platforms.
There are a couple of hiccups that we need to figure out. Closed captioning for discussions is a major need. We also want to figure out a way to share images and emojis in chats.
The difference wasn’t in usability. It was in who owned the space.
And the cost? Roughly $1.75 for the entire evening. When the server is off, we’re paying pennies per day to preserve configuration. Not ongoing surveillance rent.
We didn’t just change tools. We changed the relationship.
In the next post, I’ll walk through the technical steps required to make this work. Especially the parts that weren’t obvious at first, like SSL certificates, public IPs, and moderator control.