CMS Garden Open Web Lounge

Digital sovereignty and data protection were the specifications for the implementation of the virtual Open Web Lounge 2020 of CMS Garden e. V.

This post describes the selection of components that contributed to the success of the event and which we were able to help deploy.For its virtual Open Web Lounge 2020, CMS Garden e. V. challenged us to realise the implementation exclusively with open source tools and self-services. Digital sovereignty and data protection should not be disregarded.

Customer wishes

• Realise a virtual conference exclusively with open source software.
• All tools used should be self-hosted and operated on infrastructure located in Germany. Focus on digital sovereignty and continuous compliance with the GDPR.
• Deploy BigBlueButton and make it scalable.
• Integration of Cloudron, as Rocket.chat and the collaborative protocol pad CodiMD are already running on it. Members of the CMS Garden are all registered with their account in the Cloudron LDAP.
• Participation should be possible free of charge. Interested parties should register independently. Must-have: Interested parties should automatically be registered as users in the downstream open source tools! Nice-to-Have: Single-sign-on would be nice, but is not a showstopper.
• monitors of the instance to be able to turn screws in time.

Implementation

The implementation is carried out with Univention Corporate Server, Cloudron and BBBatScale.

A more detailed description of the project can be found on the blog of our partner Univention. Article Open Web Lounge in the Univention blog.

Summary

We have learned from the initial pain and improved our setup so that we can now also equip larger events safely and with high performance.

Useful links for the setup

• Partner of Univention in the area of school and business support. Project implementations with focus on FOSS, digital sovereignty and DSGVO compliance.
• Umbrella organization of the most active open source content management systems.
• CMS Garden e. V. conference held annually in the fall.
• Self-hosting platform with built-in sysadmin for more than 80+ apps.
• Provider of open source products for the operation and management of IT infrastructures.
• Chat communication platform, self-hosted as open source software, fully compliant with the requirements of the GDPR.
• Collaborative Markdown editor.
• Self-hosting alternative to services like Twitch and YouTube Live.
• Along with Jitsi, a free open source alternative to video conferencing systems like zoom or Webex. Focus: e-learning.
• Multi-tenant load balancer for BigBlueButton with LDAP connection and room management. Can also be used as a frontend instead of Greenlight.