
Another summer, another exciting cohort of contributors joining the Jitsi community! We’re thrilled to announce the five projects underway for Google Summer of Code 2026. Each one tackles a meaningful part of the Jitsi stack, and each one is being driven by a student contributor stepping into open source — many for the very first time.
For years, Jitsi has been a home for newcomers to open source. Our maintainers remember what it’s like to submit that nervous first pull request, and we’ve built our GSoC program around that spirit: real mentorship, real code that ships to millions of users, and a welcoming community that meets first-timers where they are. GSoC has always been more than a summer internship for us — it’s how we grow the next generation of contributors, and many of our past students have gone on to become long-term maintainers and mentors themselves.
Here’s what our 2026 contributors are building.
The 2026 Projects
Chat Moderation & Editing
Jitsi’s chat is getting a serious upgrade. This project adds the moderation and editing tools that today’s chat is missing — giving moderators the ability to delete and redact messages, mute or remove participants, and handle user reports directly from the chat interface. Users will also be able to edit their own messages with version history and search through chat history more easily. It’s a substantial improvement to everyday usability for anyone running a meeting.
JavaScriptReactReact NativeProsody
Contributor: Alok Raj
Mentors: Mihaela Dumitru, Calin Chitu
Tracing Calls Through Backend Components
Debugging a distributed system is hard when you can’t follow a single call through it. This project brings distributed tracing (using modern observability tooling like OpenTelemetry) to Jitsi’s backend, correlating traces across JVB, Jicofo, and Prosody so developers and operators can see exactly how a call moves through the stack. The result is better debugging, clearer performance analysis, and sample dashboards for common scenarios.
JavaKotlinLuaOpenTelemetryDistributed SystemsObservability
Contributor: Julián González Calderón
Mentors: Aaron van Meerten, Scott Boone
Rewrite Jibri to Use the iframe API
Jibri, our recording and live-streaming component, currently loads Jitsi Meet directly in a headless browser. This project rewrites it to use the External (iframe) API instead — a cleaner architecture that means better control over the meeting, easier maintainability, and access to new API features for enhanced recording, all while keeping full parity with today’s capabilities.
KotlinJavaSelenium WebDriverJavaScript
Contributor: Hugo Lavernhe
Mentors: Damyan Minkov, Jaya Allamsetty
Document Picture-in-Picture for Browser Meetings
Modern browsers now support the Document Picture-in-Picture API, which lets an entire interactive document (not just a video) float in an always-on-top window. This project brings that to Jitsi Meet, so you can keep your meeting visible and interactive while working in other apps — complete with customizable layouts and in-window controls for mute, video, and chat.
JavaScriptTypeScriptReactDocument PiP APICSS
Contributor: Bandhan Majumder
Mentors: Hristo Terezov, Horatiu Muresan
Multi-Screen Support
Today, one participant means one window and one layout. This project changes that by distributing a single meeting session across multiple windows and displays. Imagine the active speaker on one screen, gallery view on another, and different participant groups on their own displays — all kept in sync. It’s a big step forward for power users, event setups, and anyone with room to spread out.
JavaScriptTypeScriptReactWebRTC
Contributor: Abhay Madan
Mentors: Tudor Avram, Cosmin-Alexandru Timis
To Our Contributors and Community
To our 2026 students: welcome. You’re joining a project used by people all over the world, and the work you do this summer will be part of that.
And to everyone considering their first open source contribution someday — whether through GSoC or otherwise — Jitsi’s doors are open. That first pull request is closer than you think.
Happy hacking, and here’s to a great summer!
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