Kickstarting conversations with lightning talks.

A lot of people are coming to the Nextcloud conference to discuss ideas they have with others and I've been telling them to submit a lightning talk. As that is the idea of the lightning track on Saturday and Sunday: present yourself and the project you (want to) work on, inspire, share ideas. That way, others can then find you and talk to you afterward!

Last year I wrote a longer article about that on opensource.com, but this is the gist of it: it is a conversation kickstarter! Our event is very hands-on (bring your laptop, we say!) and the program is mostly there to facilitate the natural flow of ideas and code.

So we have three kinds of sessions:

• Keynote = inspiration. Everyone joints to listen to a fascinating story! Our keynote speakers are Karen and Jane.
• Lightning talks = sharing. Everyone in one room listens to what others are thinking about, working on or inspired by. Then, after, you look each other up and start talking and doing! Think 'unconference'.
• Workshops = learning and collaborating. They're coding, interactive, either teaching/learning or more "let's work on X for an hour together".

The event starts in two weeks at the TU Berlin: September 16-23 so it is time to book your trip. If you care about open source, privacy-protecting cloud services it is a great place to find like-minded folks!

What's coming?

Besides the keynotes by Karen Sandler (Managing DIrector at SFC) and Jane Silber (CEO of Canonical) We have some 30 sessions already submitted, just a selection:

• Nextcloud Security by Lukas Reschke
• Enterprise grade two factor authentication with Nextcloud by Cornelius Kölbel
• Upcoming features of Android Nextcloud by Tobias Kaminsky
• Nextcloud Scalability with a concept design for 10.000 users by Dennis Pennings (Friday program!)
• Installing NextCloud with SSL/TLS in less than 5 minutes on UBOS by Johannes Ernst
• MySQL Database Scalability by Oli Sennhauser (Friday program!)
• Next generation of federation by Björn Schießle (Friday program!)
• Theming your Nextcloud by Julius Haertl
• Collabora Online by Michael Meeks
• Performance Testing at Nextcloud by Morris Jobke

More still coming, I know Cornelius Schumacher wanted to talk about the importance of privacy-protecting cloud services (if his family can miss him for the weekend...) and I still have some other talks to approve in the queue.
The gist of it is that we'll have a lot of technical people, the folks who wrote Nextcloud as well as many others who contributed and have been using it, from home users to enterprise and educational or government agencies - all together to discuss and work on where our technology is going.

Oh, and we have a surprise on Friday afternoon. ;-)

Check it out and see you there!