Björn Schießle

Real-Time communication happens often in teams these days: at work, in your sports club, your Free Software project and in many other places. For a long time this was, and in many areas often still is, dominated by centralized and proprietary tools. While there are many great Free Software projects out there which fill the gap, Nextcloud Talk is unique as it ingrates in a complete collaboration platform. You can have your files, calendar, contacts, project plan and any other data in the same place where the communication takes place, all nicely integrated. You can edit collaboratively office documents (text, spreadsheets, presentations,...) or markdown files while having a chat, video- or audio call for example. This talk will introduce you to some of the unique features Nextcloud Talk can offer to your teams.

Nextcloud Talk is part of the Nextcloud collaboration platform. A complete Free Software and on-premise cloud solution which allows you to manage all kind of data and work collaboratively on it, both in one Nextcloud instance and even across different Nextcloud instances. Nextcloud Talk is based on WebRTC and offers a nicely integrated tool for text-, video- and audio-chats. As Nextcloud Talk is a first-class citizen in the Nextcloud platform it is well integrated with all the other components. You can share documents from Nextcloud Files into a room and every user will directly be able to see, sync and edit the files. You can work on a document with your team while have a call or chat, and many more things are possible. While you can find for every single task great Free Software tools these days. The uniqueness of Nextcloud Talk is the integration in one collaboration platform so that all the different areas can work nicely together, integrated in a way which often even outperform proprietary competitors. This talk will introduce the audience to all the possibilities of Nextcloud Talk and will show them how they can reach a new level of productivity for their group with the collaboration platform Nextcloud.

Nextcloud enables you to regain control over your data and freely share and sync them. That's probably the part of Nextcloud most people are already familiar with. But Nextcloud takes huge efforts to go beyond handling your data and provides strong collaboration and communication tools. In 2019 most people not only want to store their data, they are looking for a integrated platform which allows them to do actual work with their data. In this context collaborative editing but also video, audio and text chat, integration with your contacts and calendars and many more play an important role. If you want to do this without losing the connection to your friends, family and co-workers strong federation capabilities are needed. Federation is at the heart of Nextcloud and was completely re-written last year based on the vendor neutral Open Cloud Mesh (OCM) specification.

Additionally to the OCM implementation which allows you to share data across Nextcloud instances, we are excited to announce that with Nextcloud 15 we joined the Fediverse with our own ActivityPub implementation. This turns every Nextcloud user into a participant of the free, open and federated social network and allow them to communicate with people on Mastodon, Friendica, Pleroma and many more. Join the talk and learn what you can do with Nextcloud and how to join the cloud federation.

The internet started as a decentralized network based on Open Standards. Back then everybody could set up his own web server, mail server or news server and communicate with the rest of the world. The last years we saw, that for many users the internet was reduced to a few centralized services used to connect with their friends, to communicate and to store and share all kind of data. Nextcloud wants counteract this development for people who want to store, sync and share their data. It provides a cloud platform based on Open Standards and Free Software. To connect the nodes of self-hosted cloud platforms, Nextcloud is the driving force behind the concept of Cloud Federation. The aim is to provide a Open Standard to share data across multiple cloud servers. At the moment this protocol is not only implemented by Nextcloud but also by Pydio and ownCloud. Together with many partners, Nextcloud works on formalizing the protocols to create a real standard. This talk want to discuss how to restore a free, decentralized and open internet in the area of data sync and share.

The internet started as a decentralized network based on Open Standards. Back then everybody could set up his own web server, mail server or news server and communicate with the rest of the world. The last years we saw, that for many users the internet was reduced to a few centralized services used to connect with their friends, to communicate and to store and share all kind of data. This lecture looks at this development from the perspective of a cloud platform which enables people to store, share and sync all kind of data. In this area we saw already the last years a strong push to more decentralized solution, developed as Free Software. This was a important step in the right direction, but at the same time it created a new problem. Everybody who set up his own cloud platform can only collaborate with users on the same server. It become obvious that we need a way to connect all this clouds again. Like with email, for example, it shouldn't make a difference if you communicate with someone on the same server or not. In order to build this bridge, a concept called Cloud Federation was introduced. The aim is to provide a Open Standard to share data across multiple cloud servers. At the moment this protocol connects all Nextcloud, Pydio and ownCloud users. Today Nextcloud is the driving force behind this development and work actively with many partners on formalizing the protocol in order to create a real Open Standard. This talk wants to discuss the development in the world of cloud platforms and how Nextcloud can help to restore a free, decentralized and open internet in this area.