What we built

• Virtual classroom engine – real-time multi-participant video conferencing powered by Jitsi Meet, an open-source WebRTC platform that can be self-hosted and customised.
• Recording and broadcasting – integrated Jibri (Jitsi Broadcasting Infrastructure) for server-side recording of sessions and live-streaming to secondary audiences.
• Infrastructure as code – the entire environment provisioned and managed with Terraform, enabling reproducible deployments, environment parity and rapid scaling.
• Custom integrations – authentication, user management and session scheduling wired into the broader UNICEF platform ecosystem.

Why this stack?

Jitsi Meet gave us a WebRTC foundation that is battle-tested at scale, fully open-source and highly customisable – key for an organisation like UNICEF that has strict data governance and sovereignty requirements. Jibri extended it with server-side recording without compromising participant privacy (no client-side screen capture).

Terraform made the infrastructure auditable, version-controlled and repeatable. For a globally distributed organisation where environments can span multiple regions and compliance zones, having every resource declared as code is not optional – it is a prerequisite.

Challenges and how we solved them

• Media server capacity – Jitsi's selective forwarding unit (SFU) architecture was tuned to handle simultaneous sessions with dozens of participants, with Jibri instances horizontally scaled per-session-demand.
• Network heterogeneity – participants connect from varying network conditions. We configured adaptive bitrate and fallback audio-only modes so that poor connectivity didn't break sessions.
• Compliance and data residency – Terraform configurations were parameterised per region to ensure data stayed within required boundaries, with separate state backends per environment.

Outcome

The platform was delivered on schedule and successfully used for UNICEF's e-learning programmes. It demonstrated that open-source WebRTC technology, properly engineered and operated, can match or exceed the reliability and flexibility of commercial alternatives – while giving the client full ownership and control of their data and infrastructure.

Working with UNICEF reinforced our approach: understand the constraints first (data governance, scale, access patterns), choose open and auditable technology, and make the infrastructure reproducible from day one.