Open-source product engineering
Lobby chat and challenge-response messaging for Jitsi Meet
Two upstream contributions gave moderators a direct communication path to participants waiting in a locked meeting lobby.
- Jitsi Meet
- WebRTC
- Open source
- Product engineering
- 2
- Upstream pull requests
- 2 layers
- Library and product interface
- 2022
- Merged into Jitsi
The challenge
The constraint behind the work.
A locked meeting room can show who is waiting, but a display name alone may not give a moderator enough information to decide whether the person should enter.
Jitsi Meet needed a way for moderators and waiting participants to exchange messages before admission. The capability had to work through both the lower-level conference library and the user-facing meeting interface.
Our role
Responsibility at the critical interfaces.
With funding from The Document Foundation, the Doganbros team, now Consensus Labs, developed the messaging foundation and the lobby chat experience for Jitsi Meet.
The work was designed for upstream contribution. That required implementation at the correct layers, compatibility with the existing lobby model, and review through the Jitsi projects' public development process.
The work
What the engagement covered.
- 01 Add lobby messaging methods and challenge-response support in lib-jitsi-meet
- 02 Build the moderator and waiting-participant chat flow in Jitsi Meet
- 03 Connect product behavior to the underlying conference events and state
- 04 Work through upstream review until both contributions were accepted
Outcome and status
Communication before admission
Moderators gained a direct way to ask for context or verification before admitting a participant to a locked room.
The two contributions were merged upstream in February and March 2022, making the capability part of the wider open-source product rather than a private fork.
The project reflects our approach to open-source product engineering: identify the operational gap, implement it at the right layers, and contribute the result through the project's own review process.
Public evidence
Sources that document the work.
Related capability
