Privacy, self-hosting, surveillance, security and open source in Berlin

August 22-29 we're organizing a conference to discuss and work on privacy, self-hosting, security and open source in Berlin: the Nextcloud Conference. We expect some 150-200 people to participate during a week of discussing and coding and, especially on the weekend, presenting and workshopping. So I thought I should blog about why should you be there and what can you expect?

If you care about protecting people from the all-pervasive surveillance, re-gain privacy and security of data and believe in self hosting and open source as solution for these issues, this is the place to be. Our event is special for two reasons:

The team that started ownCloud

We're doing it. And most of us have been, for a decade or more, in KDE, GNOME, SUSE, Ubuntu, phpBB and other earlier projects. The code we wrote has influenced millions of users already and we will go further and wider! Expect to meet people with a can-do attitude.

Second, Nextcloud has got a huge momentum, name recognition and has become one of the largest ecosystems in the open source privacy/self hosting area. It isn't just about us! Large companies, small startups and innovative individuals and small communities all over are building on and around Nextcloud. A few examples:

• Our keynote speaker is former Mozilla president Tristan Nitot, who is currently CTO of Cozycloud, another private, open source self-hosted cloud solution.
• We're working with the GNOME community on deeper Linux desktop integration (we hope we can bring those also to KDE's Plasma!) and lots of projects built on our technology, like the super cool Mail-in-a-box
• Many third party apps like the buttercup password manager, DAVdroid android app, PrivacyIdea 2FA and Gluu SSO, Collabora Online and the innovative open source Blockchain storage SIA provide Nextcloud integration. And more are coming, expect announcements at the Nextcloud conference!
• We have well over 70 different providers like CiviHosting
• You can find over 80 apps on our app store offering all kinds of additional capabilities and integrations, from Kanban or time planning apps to the mentioned authentication and external storages to music players to drawing apps to full text search to...
• One organization after another implements or moves to Nextcloud, with the TU Berlin  (where our conference takes place, like last year) and the capital of Albania merely the last in the long list.

We are doers

So the Nextcloud conference is where you can find a wide range of individuals with interest, skills and ideas in the area of privacy and freedom activism, and they are doers! There is a reason we say "bring your laptop" on our conference page, though with that we don't mean we only want coders there!

Designers, activists and advocates are just as welcome. That is because Nextcloud is about more than technology. Frank is somebody who sometimes asks the hard questions and obviously it his vision is a strong diver, but we're all long time open source and/or privacy activists and deeply and personally motivated. Our entire community is built on drive, passion and a will to take on the challenges our society offers in the area of privacy, self determination, freedom.

That is the why you should be there. To help make a difference.

Now the what.

Getting Stuff Done

Our goal is to get work done; and facilitate communication and collaboration in our community. During the week, we simply provide space to talk and code (with wired and wireless network, Club Mate & other drinks, and free lunch). In the weekend, we have a program with talks & workshops. The setup is simple:

In the morning, everybody is in one room. First, we all hear from long time privacy activist and former Mozilla president Tristan Nitot. After that, community members working on a wide variety of interesting things around privacy/self hosting/open source and of course Nextcloud talk, shortly, about what they do. Just 3-8 minutes to give the audience an idea of their project, their plan, their idea, how to get involved, a call for action. Now again, everybody is in the room, so in the break, everybody has heard the same talks and has the same things to discuss! If you have something to add, be it about TOR, protests, encryption or anything else that is related: SUBMIT A TALK!

Collaboration & sharing ideas

Last year we announced the Nextcloud Box.
This year - be there and find out!

People can look up the speakers, join the meetings proposed and so on, in the afternoon. Because after lunch we have 2 (or more, not sure yet) tracks of workshops as well as hacking, coding and meetings in the coding rooms. Unconference style, so to say.

We now have several dozen talks and workshops already submitted and well over 100 people have registered but we are looking for more input in all areas so consider to be a part of this event!

It is free and open, supported by the TU Berlin which offers us a free location; and Nextcloud GmbH which sponsors drinks & practical stuff; and SUSE Linux which sponsors the Saturday evening party!

Learn more and register!

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!

Thursday: ownCloud at Open Tech Summit!

Coming Thursday I'll be talking and workshopping at the Open Tech Summit about getting your ownCloud up and running, either on a laptop, desktop or server or on a Pi(like) device like a Raspberry or Banana Pi. I will bring a few devices to play with, it will be fun!

If you'd like to join, there's a number of free tickets available. Go to this website to register and use the code WELOVEOWNCLOUD.

See you there!

FOSDEM 2016 and ownCloud, Kolab, KDE and more

Devices at our booth

After rocking SCALE, FOSDEM was next and a great event. Killing, too - two days with about 8000 people, it was insane. Lots of positive people again, loads of stuff we handed out so we ran out on Sunday morning - and cool devices at the ownCloud booth.

Team

When we still had stickers and Jan still liked me

We had quite a team at the booth, with Frank Karlitschek, Philippe Hemmel, Jan-C Borghardt, Lukas Reschke and myself. Lukas visited his first FOSDEM and even though he started to complain a bit on Sunday about having had to many social interactions, he enjoyed it. Philippe was at his first ownCloud booth but has helped out at booths before so that went entirely smooth and Jan - well, he's so popular, people were nice to me a few times thinking I was Jan. I had to disappoint them, Jan was often to be found in the Design devroom where he gave a talk about how we do design at ownCloud (see also our earlier blog about 6 ownCloud User Interaction Design Principles).

Lukas and cameras don't go together well

My experience was the usual FOSDEM rush with so many people already there at 9:30 on Saturday (even though it is supposed to start at 10:00) that you barely have time to think, eat & drink or walk around and talk to old friends. I already had a long day on Friday as I went to a community statistics workshop by Bitergia but I'd even be tired after FOSDEM if I had a week to sleep in before...

Stuff

Frank pushes press away ;-)

We had lots of stuff at the booth. Our usual stickers, flyers and some posters as well as my laptop where people could see ownCloud and sign up to our newsletter (80 new readers, yay). We also had some very cool devices, 2 prototypes from our friends at Western Digital and a spreed.me box, stay tuned as we have some cool news coming from there soon ;-)

Unfortunately, I hadn't brought enough stickers and flyers, we ran out in the morning of Sunday already, as Jan couldn't help but tell me over and over again. Yes, I brought over twice as much as last year but I guess I didn't factor in the growth in popularity of ownCloud... I'll double up again next year. Maybe triple.

It was great to talk to people about ownCloud, the devices, give them stickers and, in rare cases, explain what ownCloud is. Most people who walked by the booth already used ownCloud (yeah, techie crowd!) or are planning to, just one out of 10 has not heard of it. In general, my biggest regret at FOSDEM is that there are still people walking by whom we didn't manage to talk to. Perhaps more of those don't know the awesome that is ownCloud and are put off by the busyness at our booth - at many times, there was a row of 3-4 people thick in front of the booth and three of us were each talking to several people at once. Did I mention it was insanely busy?

Other booths

I did have some time to walk around and meet people at other booths, like the KDE, openSUSE and Kolab booths close by, as well as the FSFE stand. And I will promise myself, again, that I'll walk past all booths next year. Next year... Looking forward to it already!

FSFE let you send postcards to your favorite projects! A really nice initiative.

KDE showing their 'convergence'. The had Plasma Desktop running on an oDroid C1, quite smooth, and a mobile phone running Plasma Mobile! And very nice name stickers, too.

Happy Kolab team

Selfie with Markus Feilner - now at openSUSE. Their booth was close to ours, good to see so many old friends there again, including a strong Greek delegation!

Give me a shout if you want to help out at the ownCloud booth at FOSDEM or other events as we can always use more helping hands...

SCALE14x - and 8 million users for ownCloud!

After covering openSUSE and KDE booths at SCALE in my previous blog, let's talk ownCloud. Note that, despite the awesomeness of this blog post, our biggest news right now is probably the announcement that ownCloud has an estimated 8 million users!

Our booth

So SCALE14x had an ownCloud booth staffed by the Dynamic Duo Matt McGraw and yours truly. We had the usual flyers, posters and stickers but Matt had also brought a big monitor and Mountain Dew. In case you don't know the drink, it is important to know that it is by far not as natural as the name suggests.

The Story of the Mountain Dew

The plan with the drinks was to hand them out to people who would mention Chris' hair (the Linux Action Show host) - Matt had told people to come by our booth and ask about it to get a drink. Sadly, nobody did show, either due to fear of Mountain Dew (my bet) or there were few or no Linux Action Show viewers at SCALE14x... The idea is brilliant, though, and I think we should try again next year. Perhaps with a drink that isn't fluorescent green, or make sure Chris mentions it in the Linux Action Show itself?

Latest prototype of the ownCloud WD Pi Drive

(and seriously, I had a few Moutain Dew's, nothing wrong with carbonated sugar drinks if you ask me)

Western Digital Pi Drive Kits

The monitor had another purpose: demo ownCloud, of course. That turned out real cool: upon arrival at my hotel, I had received a package with the latest prototypes of our Pi Drive kits send by Western Digital! The casings have a cool ownCloud logo on them and there was a custom, 3d-printed cover to close the thing off on the top, looking real slick with ownCloud logo cut-out.

Anyhow, we assembled one Pi kit, put ownCloud on it (duh) and ran it from the screen so we could demo ownCloud. The other kit we kept in half-assembled state for people to check out. We had a *lot* of people who were interested, we certainly sold many of the existing Pi Drive kits (you can already get them, without ownCloud though, from the WD store) while many others will wait for us to release the PiDrive with ownCloud. Maybe I'm very optimistic here but the excitement was so great I have the feeling we'll sell those 500 in no time.

On a related note, the Western Digital team working on the Pi Drive/ownCloud project came by the booth for a chat, too. It was great to meet them and shake hands in real life!

Matt explains what this 'ownCloud' thing is

Booth visitors

So we talked to people at the booth. I must've talked to about 50.000 people, my throat is soar (and you all know I have plenty experience talking as I usually can't stop - so this is saying something). Some highlights from me (I'm hoping Matt will share some of his):

• talked to Ubuntu people about the Pi project, they love it and want to work with us on that and other things.
• Cory Doctorow came to our booth to tell us how much he loves what we do. I asked if I could quote him but forgot to ask him for a picture.
• A photography-loving couple came by our booth and they were super duper excited to hear about ownCloud. For them, a better way of sharing pictures, esp large amounts (dropbox ain't so good with the tens of gigabytes) was really interesting. The girl claimed that if you could see emoticons IRL she'd have hearts flying out of her head. Yeah, disturbingly geeky, but fun!
• somebody noted that it'd be good to have had 'a marketing person' at our booth, as no 'marketing person' would've forgotten to ask Corey for a picture. I thought about new job opportunities.
• Talked to Intel people about Minnowboard - intel Pi like board. Might be interesting for our Pi Drive project - at least it has USB 3, Sata, room for a MSATA card (!) and loads of ram. Of course, there is price but - let's see.
• Talked to the community manager from Digital Ocean, we'll do some promo together. He also asked if we could give feedback on their ownCloud setup/one- click-install image. I've asked for a free login to check it out, I'll then ask around soon if anybody is interested in checking out what they have and giving them tips on improving it. I'll also ask how many users they approximately have, would be interesting to know!
• Corey came by the booth again, as he wanted to tell us about XO-ware and their tech to get through firewalls. I first made him hold our poster and took a pic for on twitter.
  

  #ownCloud is now an @doctorow approved project! #SCALE14x pic.twitter.com/uJt0HZpPW0

  — ownCloud community (@ownClouders) January 22, 2016

• Talked to CEO of XO-ware. They found a way through the firewall of routers which involves an external server but no proxy-ing. They plan on open-sourcing their stuff next month, we should look into it for ownCloud Proxy and the Pi-Drive project. Oh, and it is interesting tech in general, of course! Check it out.
• In the plane back home I sat next to a movie music composer (you can hear him in the latest X-men, for better or worse) who was completely happy once told about ownCloud - he's now shuffling gigabytes of music files with Dropbox but not too happy with it. ownCloud might become big in Hollywood ;-)

Talked to many, many more interesting, nice, sweet, peculiar people from all over but there's one last special thing I must share: I did not hear A SINGLE COMPLAINT. None. Nada. Zilch. Sure, people were happy to hear we're working on stuff like the upgrade process, but none of them complained. Maybe it was the sunny weather but I just think you're all doing a GREAT job, because that is what people told me!!!

So a big THANK YOU relayed from SCALE14x. Hugs all around: *you all rock!*

Talks

I gave two talks, one about ownCloud scalability and Raspberry Pi. That is a weird combination indeed, it was inspired by Joas' cool BananaPi Cluster project. I couldn't use that, though, as it is a bit stuck and I myself didn't have time to experiment much either. Thus, instead, I talked about scalability, different Pi devices and the Western Digital project (again, lots of people excited about that). Find it here.

The second talk was a longer version of the lightning talk I did at the ownCloud Contributor Conference. Clearly, that was compressed too much, this one worked out far better and people said they liked it a lot. Well, hey, if I insult you and yet you come ask for more, either I do something right or you do something wrong, correct? The talk starts at about the 8th minute, enjoy.

more

I did also talk to some press people, spend sleepless nights due to jetlag and found decent Blueberry Pancakes. I miss good bread whenever I visit the US (and UK) but pancakes, oh boy, THAT they do right like nobody... Hmmmm.

Of course I had fun dancing the security theater at the airports I went through, with some special fun at Gatwick. Going through a very comprehensive security check right after stepping off your plane from Los Angelos seems... beyond useless. And all those comprehensive checks didn't notice there's a typo in my name on the tickets. Ahum. I'd probably be stuck half the way if they really read my email AND had the resources to actually do something with it - but we all know that they rather throw more hay on the stack than spend time finding the needle so I felt quite safe emailing a report including this note to the ownCloud mailing list from London Gatwick!


Swapnil 'praying' for his food ;-)

Well, that's it, if you read through all of it to this point I tip my hat to you for your commendable stamina enduring my writing. If you want that hat tip on camera, look me up on FOSDEM and we'll take a pic with me tipping my hat to you.

SCALE14x fun - openSUSE, KDE

Last weekend was SCALE and I had a lot of fun. Thought a report on the KDE/openSUSE presence would be good!


An impression from the trip - as in, Oslo->Los Angelos.


The event started with talks and I even managed to join the keynote by Corey Doctorow before heading to the booth!

openSUSE

If you didn't know it yet, now you do: both the KDE and GNOME booth are organized by openSUSE, and more precisely Booth Master Drew Adams. His energy makes, I think, openSUSE the most active community booth at FOSDEM with about a dozen volunteers (!!!). He keeps bringing in new people, amazing really. The corner booth worked out great though they wanted to try and move the openSUSE booth to be next to the SUSE one (which was sandwiched between Mageia and the FSF). Thinking about it now - it would have made SUSE pale in comparison...

Such a great presence at an event has a real impact in many ways, from introducing people to openSUSE and giving users a chance to chat about it to also showing people the Geeko matters and what it is up to. Plus, it's a great time for the team, too. So, awesome many points for Drew, really. Next time you see him: give him a hug!


The openSUSE Booth where visitors were thought about the Ways of the Geeko: Tumbling and Leaping!

KDE

I asked for volunteers in a blog some weeks ago and the good news is that people stepped up! Scarlett, who's working on becoming a Debian maintainer, as well as her Debian sponsor Diane, both stepped up to help out. Backbone of the booth this year was Barrington Daltrey who hasn't been representing KDE at SCALE for some years but decided to get back in the game again. A massive thanks to all three volunteers! I'm hoping that next year, Bert and Linda Yerke (who couldn't make it this year) are able to join again, we can have a real KDE party then! Especially as the Yerkes created some great swag last year (the awesome Konqi stickers!) and I have high expectations for what they might bring in 2017.

In any case, with these volunteers, the booth was staffed and lots of people could get their questions answered and had a place to leave their praise and thanks.


GNOME and KDE - brothers in arms!


Scarlett took a pic with me ;-)

Others

Of course, there was also the GNOME booth, well staffed and with demo devices. Walking over the rest of the exhibition hall, I spotted other distro's and projects. Elementary looked nice (their icons seem their biggest asset, seeing how they were promoted) and I talked to people at the Ubuntu booth. Their booth had a big Dell banner and two Dell employees to talk to about the Dell Developer Edition laptops. A great project and the team is doing an amazing job! Soon, the new Dell XPS devices will become available through the program and I'm thinking about getting one.

I must admit, though, that after putting the Dell XPS 13 next to my own Samsung np900x3c, the Samsung still feels sleeker, thinner, lighter, more durable. Sadly, the Samsung was a bit ahead of its time and battery life is a serious weakness. I take battery life over performance and big screens any time (not over ram, though, I want 16GB to stop running out of ram). So I'm hoping for a premium, Core M based (passively cooled) laptop from Dell, WITH Ubuntu on it. One can dream, right?


SCALE is tiring or relaxed, you pick.


Swapnil interviewing Elementary!

Besides the booths, there were also talks and lunches and dinners and conversations with loads of people


HP had only a magician at their booth. Fun, yes. But I prefer the real stuff ;-)

I'll next do an ownCloud-at-SCALE14x blog, but separate as that's where I spend most of my time and I thus have a lot to write about it!

I'll be at SCALE and FOSDEM, how about you?

Next week, the Fourteenth Annual Southern California Linux Expo kicks off in Pasadena, LA. A week later it's FOSDEM time, in Brussels, Belgium. Both events have a ownCloud booth and a KDE booth, and both can use some help! More importantly, I have to tell you why you should bother.

  

Helping at a Booth

You might read this (and other blogs asking for help at a booth) thinking

"why the heck would I bother"

or

"why me, I've never done this before"

It seems, perhaps, a crazy tiring and difficult thing to do, standing at a booth and talking to people all day. Coding beats it any time, you'd think. Well, believe me: reality could surprise you!

Let me ask first:

Have you ever visited a geek conference like FOSDEM, SCALE, or something smaller, locally?

If not, let me tell you - it is a blast. Interesting technology but more importantly - interesting people. Often, you can talk to the people who "do the work" and believe me, they have things to say.

"Conferences are like rock concerts: the back stage experience is THE BEST"

But let me tell you a secret. Conferences are like rock concerts: the back stage experience is THE BEST. Seriously, being part of the booth team adds a whole extra dimension to the experience. First, because you get to talk far more intensely with the rest of the team - you'll be there setting up the booth, having breakfast in the morning and beers together at night, plain awesome. But don't discount the visitors. Many have interesting questions and stories to tell and the conversations can be fascinating.

The Good Stuff

Now you might say:

"but it is hard work, right, with hard questions to answer? And all I get is a free entree ticket..."

Yeah, true on the ticket. And you might not be a huge fan of people and talking in the first place, perhaps, I get that, too.

But you're still wrong about it. You see, these conversations aren't like a typical birthday party chit-chat where you have to explain (again) what you do, be nice and social to your aunts you don't like and all that. Nor is it like the pressure of a business meeting, or a networking session. It is nothing like that!

It is hard to explain, but let me try. It is more like trying to help that colleague who recently joined and just doesn't know the product very well. See, people are almost always nice, interested and just as geeky as you. You might not know the but it isn't about that: they don't really talk to "you" but to "KDE" or "ownCloud". Even if you're not naturally a speaker or enthusiastic, the conversations are very easy. As a matter of fact, after having had five, you'll notice four of those went almost exactly the same and you'll develop a kind of elevator pitch, not the fancy ones, but the ones you just naturally assume. Believe me, before you know it, you'll be approaching people who haven't asked a question yet and ask if you can help them.

"Some visitors can be best described with words usually bleeped out on TV."

The difficult people

Of course I won't claim it is all, always easy. Sometimes, visitors can be described with words usually bleeped out on television. I won't lie to you. But even this isn't too hard to handle. First, because you don't write all of the code in your project, or even none in many cases (like mine). You don't have to take it personally. Plus, realize that, in most cases, those being difficult do it because they care: they wish the project was more, better than it is - that happens to be a wish you share with them. Often it just isn't meant half as bad as it might have sounded and a quick conversation shows the common ground. Moreover, you are not alone. You have your team mates to back you up (or complain to after the visitor left) and hey, that's just bonding, right there!

I think that without the few bad conversations, the really good ones wouldn't stand out as much. Yes, there are really nice, energizing conversations. From people who just come by the booth to tell you how much your project (and by extension you) rock to people who tell you, sometimes to the point of really getting emotional, how your community has provided them with something amazing. At those moments, you just soak in the love. Be sure to record or note down any concrete compliments so you can share this later with the community online, in a blog or just a mail to the development mailing list!

If you want to learn more, I've been writing a how-to on organizing a booth and collected some practical tips for conversations with the visitors on this page. More tips welcome!

Now, how can you help?

KDE

The KDE booth at SCALE is actually a bit in trouble. We have some folks who have been helping out the last few years but, perhaps in part due to the early dates, just couldn't make it this year. If you're a KDE user, contributor or just fan, think about helping out! If you use KDE software, especially Plasma of course, and occasionally follow the blogs, you'll have what it takes to help out. Most questions are basic and there are always others around who can help out a bit here or there - including myself, I'll check in a few times for sure. And the openSUSE booth next door, which helps organize the KDE and GNOME presence at SCALE, has plenty of experts in all areas as well. You won't be without backup, not at all!

KDE at FOSDEM already has six volunteers (see the wiki page) and we unfortunately only have one table this year. While help is always welcome, this ain't super urgent. It IS fun, though, so if you're up for it, give it a try!

ownCloud

Matt McGraw and myself will staff the ownCloud booth at SCALE, ready to answer any questions you might have. We're just with two people, so we'd sure welcome a third person! If you're interested, just shoot me an email or comment here. It isn't difficult - I'd even say that if you've been using ownCloud for a few months you can already provide a lot of help at the booth, and Matt and myself are always there.

At FOSDEM, we have a few more volunteers but I also know, from last year, that the booth will be flooded with visitors so if you're up for helping out, even if it's just a few hours, please let me know!

I hope to see you at one or both of these events and that I've motivated you to help run a booth ;-)

We're coming to FOSDEM and SCALE!

The conference season 2016 is coming. ownCloud will be running booths at the largest events in EU and the USA: SCALE 14x in LA and FOSDEM 2016 in Brussels!

  

SCALE 14x

The 14th SCALE moves to a new location in Pasadena, promising to be bigger and better than ever. I'm hoping the much greater distance from the LA Airport will be worth it, but I'm not taking a chance: I want to be there. Like last year, Matt McGraw has committed to helping out, Frank can unfortunately not make it. We could thus certainly use a third helper at our booth!

As Matt can attest, it is not difficult - and certainly a lot of fun to tell people about the awesome that is ownCloud and help them if they have questions. You don't need to know ownCloud inside out to be able to help, many questions are repeat questions you'll quickly learn to answer and at least half the time you're just there to pitch ownCloud or hear how much people love it.

If you're up for it, let me know!

I'll be giving two talks, one about ownCloud on embedded devices like Pi's and one in which I attest you're not as clever as you think.


Timelapse video from the booth last year ;-)

ownCloud booth between Diaspora and Tor

FOSDEM

Last year, we had a real good time at FOSDEM. We were sandwiched between Tor and Diaspora, a great spot to be in - privacy corner, so to say. We had massive numbers of people come by, ask questions, give comments - it was real great to talk to so many people.

This year, I'm counting on the same busy time. We've got a booth again, don't know where it is yet but we'll have a team to answer any questions you might have. As always, if you're up for helping out, let me know!

ownCloud Server 8.2 is here

And on time following the new three month release cycle! The previous release, ownCloud Server 8.1, was all about stability, performance and security. Now, more work has been put in the user experience. That shows in the new sidebar, the new gallery app and refreshed style but for system admins, there's a large number of new control points as well.

Gallery app

For end users, the design improvements are nice but the new Gallery app is truly a transformation. It is essentially the 'Gallery Plus' app, developed by Olivier Paroz. It is essentially a full rewrite based on the new app framework, after which lots of features and performance improvements were made. The app has been around for a while and Olivier has solidly proven himself as maintainer so I'm really glad this app is now a part of the core ownCloud experience. Below is Oliviers' talk from the ownCloud Contributor Conference, introducing the new Gallery to the community!

Notifications

The new notifications are cool, too - only one app supports them, for now, and that one isn't there by default so you won't see notifications until apps get updated. But as soon as they get adapted to the new API, accepting share invitations or getting notified of changes becomes easier and nicer. If you want to play with the notifications right now, go get the announcementcenter app and send some news to your users to see how it works!

New Appliance and Proxy app

Technically not new, as both were announced at the conference and made available since then, but super awesome: we have an official ownCloud appliance. This will make installing ownCloud a lot easier for a lot of people - and bring back some kind of Windows Server support, too.

On top of that, the appliance contains the ownCloud Proxy app, which is really great for lowering the bar even further. Simply put, ownCloud Proxy enables you to take a laptop and an Internet connection, connect to your privately hosted ownCloud from anywhere, without requiring you to make any changes to your local network settings – no router configuration, no DNS entries, no domain name registration. The ownCloud Proxy service relies on a partner who provides the service for a fee. Right now, there is one partner, pageKite. It would rock if somebody else saw business in this, too, of course!

Now, go, go and get it. Note that the VM isn't available as of right now (14:05) because it's still building... An 8.1.3 based one is there, though.

Help ownCloud rock SCALE and FOSDEM in 2016!

FOSDEM and SCALE are respectively Europe and North America's biggest FOSS events and, of course, we'd love to run a booth there again. We had a good time last year, just check out see my overview blog and detailed blogs about FOSDEM and SCALE. It is time to start preparing again to have as much fun and impact as last year!

FOSDEM

For FOSDEM we will request a booth again and like last year I am sure it will be very well visited so we need help talking to the visitors!

My experience from last year was that many use ownCloud (and love it). These users often are interested in hearing and seeing what is coming, so I usually have a demo machine with me.

People new to ownCloud are almost invariably very interested and you can help them get started.

Note that you don't need any particularly deep insight in ownCloud to be able to help. For people new to ownCloud, a general overview of how it is for you as a user is already a huge help and we always have people around who can help with the harder questions.
 
Besides the booth, it'd be great if we get some talks in at various ownCloud-related devrooms, like the decentralization room and such. See some info on this page and stay tuned for the announcements of the devrooms.

  

SCALE

The 14th SCALE moves to a new location, promising to be bigger and better than ever. I sure want to be at that epic first in a new venue and so should you!

For SCALE, too, we'll try to get us a booth again and we do expect it to be very well visited just like last year. SCALE is a very cool event with many friendly folks. It surprised me how many people already knew about ownCloud but there were still hundreds we could delight with the knowledge a real free solution exists for their cloudy needs. We can really use some hands with this!

And like with FOSDEM - you don't need to be an ownCloud expert to be able to help out. Being able to explain the concept from the users' point of view is the most important thing!

I'll shoot in a talk or two but - if you have anything you'd like to talk about, SCALE, too, has a call for papers open.

For both events we have the ability to help you with travel and hotel costs if need be. Just contact me directly about that and we can figure things out!

ownCloud needs you!

Lightning Fast

For the last two years, we had only lightning talks & workshops at the ownCloud Contributor Conference. This is an exceptionally good model for creation-type events like ours and your event might benefit from it, too.

Why

To find the best way of presenting content to visitors you must define goals for an event. If your event focuses on creating, building, developing or making and collaboration between participants who might not know each other yet is important, a track of lightning talks is a great way to kick off.

What

Lightning talks are very short sessions (3-15 minutes, usually gravitating around 5 minutes) which are typically scheduled in a single track. This means that the entire audience of an event is in the room and explains why the talks have to be short. Even if some of the subjects aren't interesting for everybody, the next comes in just a few minutes.

These talks provide an opportunity for people to present what they work on and for the audience to find out what is going happening in the project. Perhaps more importantly, the audience can find out who to talk to - connecting names and faces to subjects.

Indeed, due to their nature, lightning talks do not go very deep. This is as much a strength as it is a weakness, though, as presenters are forced to get rid of most of the content so they focus on what matters most. Overhead like lengthy personal introductions, many examples or the setup of demos falls to the wayside and a single point emerges.

How

As the format is a little more unforgiving than 30 or 60 minute 'tech talks', it is a good idea to practice in advance. Luckily, the short duration means that rehearsing the talk 5 or 6 times isn't a big time drain.

For the organization of an event it is important to get the slides from the participants well in advance. This not only forces the participants to be prepared but, as there is no time to even switch presentation files, you can prepare them in a single go. I demand slides in PDF and concatenate them in a single file.

To keep the audience hooked, schedule the lightning talks with much variation. Vary technical subjects with process-oriented talks and social ones. Look for a light note occasionally and be sure not to push to many down the throat of the visitors without an occasional break. In that time, people can look up the presenters and dig a little deeper, process the inspiration and relate it to their own interests.

It also makes sense to have them in the morning and/or the first day, so they provide a starting point for, especially, new participants. They can set the tone, perhaps not like a keynote does, but more practical.

If you additionally need more in-depth sessions and technical talks, you can schedule them in parallel after the lightning talks. This also gives speakers in the lightning talks the opportunity to invite people to these sessions, giving participants some insight in what they will cover.

My personal todo for the next #ownCloudConf includes practicing all lightning talks with all speakers in a one-on-one video call, both to solidify the deadline and increase quality.

Open Tech Summit Berlin, openSUSE Conference and more

This is a fun month. Not only are we moving forward with the ownCloud Contributor Conference (some cool interviews coming out soon), but there's a sudden avalanche of events this month. The ownCloud.org blog already wrote about it - we have had FOSDEM, SCALE, Chemnitz and may others I didn't attend myself. Find out about the openSUSE conf from last week and the upcoming OTS in Berlin!

Bunch'o'geekos

Last weekend I was at the openSUSE Conference which was a great event. I gave a workshop on how to install ownCloud on embedded devices (like Raspberry Pi and Banana Pi) with about 20 participants and while it wasn't as easy as I had hoped, everybody had fun.



There were two great BBQ evenings as well, with beer and time to talk to many, many old and young geeko friends.

I absolutely had a great time - thanks, everybody, for working on the conference and being there! I look forward to next years' event.

Upcoming

This Friday I'll give a workshop at Happy Hacking Day 2015 in Helsinki and later this month I will keynote at the DORS/CLUC conference in Zagreb, Croatia.

Open Tech Summit Berlin

Next week, May 14, is a home game, as I'll give a workshop at the Open Tech Summit at the Kalkscheune in Berlin.

I will spend a few more words on this as the event has been announced rather late, yet it looks like the place to be for Berliners next week!

The event will feature talks, workshops and panels with topics ranging from open hardware to design, graphics, software, start ups and digital policies. In a barcamp style track there is space for adhoc meetings, lightning talks and breakout sessions. There will also be dedicated workshops for kids and maker enthusiasts, where you can make your own gadgets (TV-B-Gone, upgrade knitting machines, your own traffic lights) and Fashiontec wearables. In the evening it will have an “OpenTech-Himmelfahrt” lounge and the Linux Professional Institute offers Linux certification at a discounted rate.

Speakers will include a bunch of interesting people from Freifunk, Mozilla, VLC, 3D printers and many other cool projects, discussing everything from software to hardware hacking.

Workshop and discounted access to OTS

And of course, Blizz and myself will run a workshop on how to install ownCloud on cool devices. We have some with us, but it's recommended you bring your Raspberry Pi, power, a SD card, a laptop and a network cable. You can bring your server, desktop or laptop for installation of ownCloud too, of course. You can register for the workshop here and if you haven't yet registered or gotten tickets for the event - here's a nice discount.

LAX, SCALE, KDE, SUSE, GNOME and ownCloud

Lobby of the venue

Back home. Tired and jetlaggy, but satisfied: SCALE rocked!

SCALE loves ownCloud

The 13th South California Linux Expo was awesome! It is the biggest LinuxFest in the USA. While decidedly different in nature from Europe's biggest Linux event that that took place just three weeks prior (FOSDEM), we met similarly enthusiastic existing and future users. Conversations were also similar: about half the visitors already knew ownCloud, often using it or planning on deploying it; and the other half was more than a little delighted to hear about it, often exclaiming they had been looking for 'something like that' for a while. Negativity was extremely rare: I don't recall a single negative comment at SCALE (merely a few people who liked ownCloud but had no use for it personally), FOSDEM had one conversation starting unpleasantly but quickly turning around - even though one feature of ownCloud wasn't up to snuff, the user was happy with the experience as a whole.

Before the action started!

For most users, ownCloud was simply a wonderful product and they used it at home, deployed it for customers or managed it in their company. Some asked what features were coming or just arrived in ownCloud 8, or asked about the state of specific features and in more than one occasion they very enthusiastically told me how excited they were about ownCloud, how they loved it and how they were telling everybody to use it!

ownCloud to-go

Those who didn't know ownCloud were almost invariably surprised and excited. I can't count the times I heard "wow, why did I never hear about this before" and "dude, I've been looking for something like this for ever!". Often, people wondered how long ownCloud had been around (we just turned five), if it was open source (yes, with love), how many people contributed to it (719 and counting) and how many users it has (we guestimate over 2 million, with 500,000 in this single deployment alone). Oh, and, does it scale? The deployment linked above and a mention of users like CERN can put most concerns to rest. Yes, ownCloud scales from Raspberry Pi to Atom Smashing size.

What came up a few times as barriers to their future usage of ownCloud was pretty much what I discussed before. Running a server at home is not easy and I walked by the EFF booth to ask about progress on Let's Encrypt to ask about the progress of solving one aspect of that problem: more easily getting SSL certificates. I was told the project is on track for the 2nd half of this year.

Frank and Bryan Lunduke

It is wonderful to have such energizing, positive, enthusiastic users - and to have such an enthusiastic booth crew to talk to them as well. At the booth we had Frank, Matt, Ron, Camila and myself. Awesome it was and we had great fun! Below a timelapse video of Saturday morning. It was still rather quiet but it is nice to see us jump around!

Stuff and talk

Just like at FOSDEM, we brought ownCloud stickers, hand outs explaining ownCloud to users and developers as well as some posters for the booth and pins to give out. This was all very much appreciated - I estimate we gave out about 400 hand outs and 500 or so stickers as well as about 50-100 pins.

Sunday at 3PM, I gave a talk about Privacy and ownCloud, with Frank finishing off with a section about his talk at MIT where he discussed ownCloud's Federated Cloud sharing feature and where it is going. The talk was well received; I think the angle I took to privacy (inspired by my background in psychology) spoke to the audience and Frank's description of federation and how it's done in ownCloud was very interesting. owncloud.org and owncloud.com will feature blogs with some more information about this soon.

Friends

Big, big booth!

I also walked by the booths of 'old friends' - the openSUSE/GNOME/KDE crew in particular, it was awesome to meet them. Some I hadn't seen in years, others I met for the first time. They did an amazing job and richly deserve the reward they earned for most Stunningly Amazing Booth Crew (don't know the real name of the booth award but that's what it should be). If you think that 'just' GNOME an KDE being incorporated in the openSUSE booth isn't enough - Master Planner of the Booths Drew aims to bring in Enlightenment and XFCE as well next year. Supposedly a Trello board has been set up already. I bet it won't be long before it has grown to the point where the SCALE organization needs to give the 'openSUSE booth & friends' a separate hall at SCALE...

I have to note that it was thanks to our green friends that I could hang up the ownCloud flyers - they lend me some (green!) tape to do that.

The KDE booth had a bunch of terribly cool stickers (I only now realize I forgot to get one for myself!) as well as the "frameworks 5" flyers. I could only bring, like, 5 t-shirts and a dozen old 'join-the-game' flyers so I'm glad Bert Yerke and his wife, who formed the awesome local KDE team, had created the other materials. We already discussed 2016, as they have plenty of ideas on how to improve the booth!

Awesome stickers...

If you, dear reader, want to help out at the KDE or ownCloud booth next year - let me know, either in the comments or by mail. I can promise you: it is awesomely fun and by far not as scary as you might think! Bert and Matt and everybody who has ever been at a KDE, openSUSE, ownCloud or other FOSS booth can attest to that: it is a great way of getting involved and making a big difference!

Bonus points for who finds a suitable meaning for the one item in the title which isn't yet an acrynym ;-)