After a long hard fight about the GDPR; costs and work (non-profit) needed to manage a given videoconferencing system we finally convinced everyone in power our own Jitsi server hosted by the IT-Department was the best solutions by metrics. Could do an entire post on that one, but it's besides the point.

We get it established and so now the question about access comes up, as there is a basic password gate to stop literally anybody who knows the URL to start videoconferences. We instead suggest giving any department who asks access, since by any calculations, the server getting overloaded would mean literally everybody in our organisation using it at once, which is never going to happen.

All the usual handwringing and pearl clutching about IT-Security and the GDPR by people who do not give a single solitary shit about those things at the best of times start, since they want the Zoom because it's the cool thing that the cool people use. We clear up every possible thing as well as several honest to god impossible things that could go wrong or point out about how it's impossible to clear those out by nature of how a computer works. (What if somebody gives away their access and link to a conference and we get zoombombed?).

And this is where people just start chowing down in the trash can. We had to have hour long arguments about how we can't just possibly give people anything nilly-willy, because they will expect that treatment all the time!

How there needs to be a convoluted vetting process with a review of the actual necessity of anyone needing access to a videoconference system (in the middle of a fucking pandemic) else maybe someone gets an access and doesn't even use it! And I swear to you, despite all our explanations about how this is to no benefit to anyone, including us, people just insisted. Just the idea of not having a vetting process with internal review for this did not compute for them, even when we told them it'd be expensive as all hell and do literally nothing. We need a vetting process, anything else people want has one!

How we need to have the different departments pay for it in their budget, since we can't just give people anything for free! We point out the work required to do this on any actual basis instead of a random number generator is gonna eat up the cost of the money we get back about 10 times over and people still insists it needs to be done or it's not fair.

I spent many, many hours convincing a lot of people that giving people things they need and doing it as cheaply as possible is good, actually. And eventually, we convinced enough people in charge for it to happen.

Skip forward a few months of covid and the majority of people are super happy with it. How fast they can get an access, the ease of use, not having to worry about costs in their strained budgets. A small minority holds out, finding increasingly esoteric points about how Zoom would be better because the UI is a different shade of blue, but in general, everybody happy. This is reduced to like a few morons as the authority for the GPDR starts cracking down on everybody and their grandmother selling everybodys data to the US illegally by using Zoom.

And guess fucking what, next time we suggested using a self-hosted Free Open Source Software while all the usual pearl clutching and handwringing about the GDPR and IT-Security is still there, nobody is fighting us anymore about bullshit vetting processes. Sometimes, you can get people to stop eating from the trash can of ideology.