ownCloud

Some peeks into what’s happening in our community!

Some peeks into what's happening in our community!

Thursday, Friday and Saturday last week, LinuxTag took place in Berlin. A few months ago, in a moment of temporary insanity, I had proposed to three projects to organize their booths: KDE, openSUSE and ownCloud. As that wasn't challenge enough, I ... [More] wanted to experiment with doing workshops at the booth, specifically aimed at attracting and training potential new contributors.How it came to beMusic outside!I proceeded to register a booth, promising the LinuxTag exhibition manager (Elke Moritz), the KDE e.V. board, the openSUSE Board and my brand new boss at ownCloud that we would set up a great show. As I wouldn't be able to separate ownCloud (PHP) or KDE (C++, QML) code from text in a openSUSE .spec file nor can staff three booths at once, you can imagine I promised more than I could ever deliver on my own. But that's where friends come in, right?And they came through - the result was great.Re:Publica areaThe new LinuxTagFirst, a short introduction. LinuxTag is one of the oldest European Linux events, operating under the credo: "bringing .org and .com together". That is, they feature both commercial and community booths and a big selection of talks.LinuxTag has been taking place at the Messe in Berlin in the last years, and this has not been a hugely successful location. But this year, there was change: a co-location with the immensely popular Re:Publica event as well as collaboration with DroidCon was meant to bring a lot of new energy. The new location, Station Berlin, gives a more fitting Linux feeling: much more raw. If you ask me, it worked out, LinuxTag was a much better event than it has ever been in the Messe.What did we doopenSUSE, ownCloud and KDEAs I noted, our plan was two-fold. We, that is KDE, openSUSE and ownCloud, would have a combined booth. We would use the combined space not for a traditional table+swag, instead set up an area for workshops. In short, 1 hour slots, visitors would learn the basics of working within each of the three communities. For example:writing ownCloud appsdeveloping KDE applicationspackaging for openSUSE.We wouldn't plan for a big audience: the workshops would go deep and be personal.Daniel giving a workshopSo, we got together speakers and defined a program (see my blog). I received the ownCloud and openSUSE booth materials home and the day before LinuxTag, drove it all to the venue, picking up KDE stuff from Lydia Pintscher at the wikimedia office later in the evening. Due to some snafu's with the booth area preparations we had to set up the booth in the morning - which happened even before Danimo and myself arrived with some more materials (thanks booth team!).The boothsOur booth area (all the way to the left!)We planned for little space (essentially one combined booth) but the LT team had given us so much space, we had to set up three big booths! openSUSE got the big table, ownCloud took two round ones and a third round table was covered in the KDE tablecloth, with a huge KDE flag hung up next to it. Behind it all 12 chairs and a table with a projector. All this was quite a bit more than we planned, so the initial idea (we'd only need 1-2 people at a time to do 'booth duty' for the 3-in-1 booth) didn't work out very well: all three booths had to be staffed most of the time. We did have some overlap at quiet times, but full house during especially the breaks.I had printed posters with the schedule, one for each day as we had slight schedule changes every day. We hung them up all over the place, after which we put down openSUSE, ownCloud and KDE flyers wherever there was space. The openSUSE Beer coasters did particularly well - we had put them on the tables in the eating/drinking area and we had to 'refill' several times a day.Us vs them?The posters and most of the flyers I had created for ownCloud pointed people to the booth (I stole the concept of the 'consume vs create' poster from the openSUSE Conference in Dubrovnik, btw!). We should have asked people how they found out about the workshops, from posters, blog, workshop or being told at our booth. I have no idea how effective each of those is...Let me now point to this blog by Danimo about the owncloud presence, the KDE blog by Sebastian is out too. And I expect the openSUSE team to publish their blog(s) very soon.Booth funGive some balloons to Frank, and...For me, there was some fun synergy: meeting KDE-on-openSUSE users interested in installing ownCloud. Or, after starting a conversation with somebody about one of these projects, continuing the conversation about one of the others. Several times, I got users interested in all three at once: Server Linux (openSUSE/ownCloud) and Desktop Linux (openSUSE/KDE).I also noticed that many visitors already knew ownCloud, or had at least heard of it. At some point, I was talking to a visitor, explaining ownCloud, while a second visitor joined the conversation. He already knew about ownCloud and took over, while I talked to a third visitor, answering some questions. Then a fourth showed up, who begun answering their questions while I turned to a fifth, explaining ownCloud... Great to get in conversations like that!During a quiet moment, a visitor came to me, complaining he had been 'in line' to talk to me several times, but it was so busy, he didn't get a chance before! Indeed, we had busy times, especially Thursday. But that's awesome, right?I also gave two talks - one at the evening program of LinuxTag about where the Linux Desktop is going (it didn't go very well, I'm afraid) and one about Community Governance at the first European Community Leadership Summit, that did go quite well. Shame I couldn't stay too long for the CLS as we had friends over and I had to go home...All in all, for me, it was a great event.Re:Publica HippiesThe teamLet me also not forget to introduce the team at LinuxTag to you:Daniel Molkentin (ownCloud)Arthur Schiwon (ownCloud)Georg Ehrke (ownCloud)Frank Karlitschek (ownCloud)Sebastian Gottfried (KDE)Christian Boltz (openSUSE & PostfixAdmin)Bernhard Wiedemann (openSUSE)Marcel Külhorn (openSUSE)We had several people come by and help out a bit, as well as three others giving booth workshops:Maik Aussendorf (Bareos)Gratien D'haese (REAR)Jörg Schilling (fraunhofer, cdrecord)Sebastian's KDE workshopThe workshopsDuring the booth work, we had the workshops going on. It had a bit of a slow start on Thursday morning, but quickly, the workshops started to attract some more people. At one point did I see Sebastian surrounded by six visitors interested in KDE development... I think, on average, the workshops attracted about 3-6 visitors each. Which is quite good, considering they were primarily aimed at introducing people to contributing to our projects.Despite the amount of work preparing the booth workshops, I'd do it again. Imagine if only a third of the visitors decides to join the respective communities!openSUSE booth team in actionFeedbackIf you visited one of these booth workshops or our booth at LinuxTag, I'd love your feedback! Knowing how we did, if we were friendly, fun, interesting, or what was missing and what you'd like to see next time - it all helps us improve in the future!In any case, everybody who contributed to the booths and presentations as well as everybody who visited us: thank you very much!Of course very special hugs to the booth- and presentation team. [Less]

To combat the struggles of following the progress in a project Jos Poortvliet, the community manager for ownCloud, has announced that the ownCloud development progress will be compiled on his blog. He goes on to say that if the community is receptive he will move these progress reports to the ownCloud blog.

Github in actionFrank and myself thought it would be nice to have a weekly development update around the ownCloud community. It makes it easier for people to follow what is going on, we can't all follow all mailing lists and git logs and forums and ... [More] so on. To start this up I went through information sources like the development mailing list, blogs, news and more and compiled an article about the whole month of April. If you all like it, I can start doing this weekly.Now I can't follow everything either, of course, so it would be helpful if you, dear readers, could send what YOU know is going on to me! That would ensure I don't miss any cool things. Mail me or ping me over G+, twitter or somewhere else! Any suggestion is welcome.UI mockups of new featuresDevelopmentSo, let's start with what happened in ownCloud development in April, separated by core, cloud and clients. Note that what is below is not guaranteed to end up in a release! We might re-design things, defer to a later release to give it more testing or change the feature otherwise...ownCloud coreWork is happening to refine the oC 7 public API.Lots of work on LDAP improvements (much of that landed in 6.0.3, see this blog)Some work is done for improving support for high dpi screens! See PR 1 and PR 2 for details.Progress on a tool for conversion of data between various databasesSome neat 'ajaxification' in the core, making way for:infinite scrolling for files app got merged!file sorting (by clicking column headers) is under development, needs review and help...The new user management from this pull request is almost ready to be merged!There is a project going on to make the normal ownCloud UI more usable on mobile devices. Help is of course very welcome as this is a lot of work!Good old fashioned paper mockupownCloud appswork is going on to improve the view on what happened on your ownCloud in the activity appInfinite scrolling & neater layout for pictures app are coming.A much improved music app is coming, and a variety of features is under development, like new playlist functionality.ownCloud clientsThe iOS saw work on multiple-downloads support. Not finished yet but a future version should include this. There was also work on the 'favorite files' feature.The Android client got the InstantUpload video branch finally merged. This means that once released, the client can upload video instantly, either always or only when on wifi. Thanks to zerginator for doing the hard work!The first beta for the 1.6 release of the desktop client came out and a bunch of bugs got fixed based on the feedback that came in. If you have not tried the new release, help us test it so we can make it even better. Read more about this upcoming release in this blog by Danimo.Devel mailing list discussionsThe entire month saw lots of bugfixes fly by on the devel mailing list. The news app, for example, now deals better with a host of websites, but also got reworked to be finally independent from the app framework. Meanwhile, there's a firefox plugin being developed for the News app, courtesy of our Outreach Program for Women participation.Visual bugreports with screenshots.Listing appsJan-Christoph announced that he had put together a page listing the central ownCloud apps as well as mobile and desktop clients. There is also a section 'external apps to integrate with'. With this overview he hopes to encourage collaboration over fragmentation. See the page here.Vincent Petry brought a python client library to the ownCloud list, spawning a discussion about the need for perhaps a JavaScript library as well.In other newsThe bugfix release ownCloud 6.0.3 brought new bugfixes and improved LDAP performance.The wider FOSS world saw Canonical retire Ubuntu One, to which we replied offering Ubuntu users to come and try out ownCloud. As Frank wrote when Box announced they'd open source some of the tools they use in-house for system administration and engineering:"Depending on a vendor is always risky: the vendor can go bankrupt, be bought or raise prices. In the world of web services it also often happens that vendors decide to discontinue functionality they deem not crucial enough. It could just be something you depend on!"ownCloud can be run on your own servers, not requiring you to move your data to an untrusted, third-party server farm." See his blog post.ConclusionI hope you liked the ownCloud development update of April! Obviously, the weekly ones should be shorter than this one. Let me know in the comments what you think about doing this every week. If you all think it is a good idea, I'll move this to the ownCloud blog.  [Less]

One more fan-freakin-tastik openSUSE conference is over. Thank you Dubrovnik and local organizers for such fantabulous conference. Your city is beautiful. Too bad that the weather wasn't sunny all the time (don't forget that Dubrovnik is touristic ... [More] city). The old city was dope. I mean it's very cool to stay inside the walls, go to school there. Of course restaurants, bars etc are expensive there, but still it's so cool!!!Personally don't understand why everyone in the community linked Dubrovnik with Game of thrones series. It's a Hollywood product. Maybe I'm the only one that don't watch it. On the other hand, I saw the cruelty of civil war during 91-94 and the siege of Dubrovnik that lasted for 7 months. Of course a theme couldn't use that, since it's politics (although Game of Thrones has copyrights and it's better not to use it either). Greeks, Brazilians, Germans and Czechs.People there were kind and happy to help us. During the last 2 days of the conference, there was a religious youth festival and the city was too crowded. Good for us to mingle but the transportation to and from the venue was kind of difficult for everyone.Now let's talk about the conference. I was volunteer. My duty was to keep social media updated. I didn't have time to attend to many presentations I had to watch if streaming was on, sound was OK and inform the video team if there was a problem.This year, there wasn't an organized press room, so I could do this job from anywhere. So I took my netbook and sometimes I was in the presentations room, sometimes I was sitting at the GNOME Booth. I also managed to bring swag and organize the GNOME booth. Thank you Kostas Livieratos, Anna Angelogianni, Apostolis Ntokos and Tobias Mueller that helped to have a great GNOME presence at openSUSE conference.Regarding presentations, thank openSUSEtv, I saw them when I got back home. Here some highlights:1. Since I'm not tech person, I like almost all Jos' presentations. My fav was the tips about the booths and presence. It was something that I studied and presented at openSUSE conference 2012. If we combine the presentation Social Skills for Geeks, we will have a better result to our community. Also another cool presentation was his tips to build a community in 10 steps. Since I'm passionate about ownCloud, it was good opportunity for me to watch what the new community manager has to say about it.2. Of course Tobias' presentation about GNOME was something that I watched (since I didn't make it to see him live). I presented many things that he told us here in Greece. I used the new version 3.12 and I'm very excited about it. Richard Brown told us that new version is in Tumbleweed repos and on a stable repository so users can use it.3. A must see presentation is Design and Branding - The Way Forward by Ken Wimer. Branding and new design is what makes the difference to every product (not only software). Typography, fonts, slides and how to present is what matters.4. As part of the Travel Support committee, I presented a part about the program, but Ancor's presentation about how to use the TSP application to request for reimbursement, is the presentation we should use for future questions how to use the TSP tool.Personal highlights is that I met with Tobias Mueller. We used to mail each other about GNOME. Now I met him AFK. Also another highlight was that I met Michal Meeks. He had a keynote presentation about The Document Foundation and LibreOffice.Anna, Apostolis, Wookey, Me, Francoise, Michael, KostasFor more pictures you can check Google Plus Greece and Google Plus event page.I hope I covered everything. Now the future. Next openSUSE conference will take place in The Hague. Thank to Hans de Raad. I'll see you next year!!!I would like to thank openSUSE that sponsored part of my expenses for this conference. [Less]

Last week saw several events in Berlin’s Station event location that also featured ownCloud in one way or the other. The first, re:publica, is probably mostly known by bloggers and internet activists. Titled Into the wild, an obvious tongue in cheek ... [More] about the unsafe and well-surveilled place the internet has become, it was a great place to talk about ownCloud. Frank took that opportunity and was received by a packed room, to which he delivered a talk about ownCloud. Jos and Arthur at a freshly set up booth.The last day of re:publica coincided with the first day of LinuxTag 2014, which moved from Fairgrounds to Station Berlin. This brought a lot of new people to visit our booth, which ownCloud shared with openSUSE and KDE, courtesy of our new Community Manager Jos. On Thursday, Frank and I also got invited and interviewed about ownCloud by the Sondersendung Podcast. If you can understand German, you can listen to our 15 minute interview . ownCloud is a proud sponsor of LinuxTag 2014.At the presentation area of our booth, Arthur and Georg gave workshops on writing your first ownCloud app, while I was covering the details of the synchronization process in depth. Every day of LinuxTag, quite some people took the chance to listen and ask questions. Others just walked up to our demo point for a quick demonstration of ownClouds capabilities and concepts. Some inquired about the improvements from earlier versions they have used, and most were impressed by the progress that ownCloud 6 and ownCloud Client 1.6 represent. Since LinuxTag joined forced with droidcon, we also had lots of questions on our mobile integration for Android (and iOS, :), for both ownCloud app and calendar/addressbook sync. In total, LinuxTag has been a really great show this year, which was mostly owed to the co-location with other events and the more central location. We’re looking forward to LinuxTag 2015! Arthur explaining how to write your own ownCloud app. The workshop on file synchronization. [Less]

Hybrid clouds offer organizations the control, security and flexibility required to integrate existing infrastructure investments and still preserve sensitive data. Join ESG Senior Analyst Terri McClure and ownCloud’s Matt Richards tomorrow at noon ... [More] ET as they share critical data driving the shift to a hybrid model. “Three Trends Driving Hybrid Cloud File Sharing”, is part of a series educating organizations on how to protect and maintain control of their data. “We are seeing significant pent up demand for online file sharing solutions that allow users to store some or all of their data on premises,” said McClure. “There are a number of drivers behind this demand. In addition to security concerns organizations express when it comes to storing data in the cloud, they also want to have control over where they store their data, and the ability leverage existing IT investments.” A recent survey conducted by Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. found: • Adoption of corporate file sharing is on the rise, with 42% of companies currently using solutions • 90% of current and potential OFS (Online File Sharing) users prohibit some type of data from being stored in the public cloud • Accordingly, 69% of organizations already using cloud-based solutions read more … [Less]

I had the pleasure today of joining IBM’s general manager of Storage and Software Defined Systems Jamie Thomas on a panel — Big Data: Stories from the Trenches – at IBM’s Fast Data Forum in Boston. Joined by folks from Cypress Semiconductor and ... [More] Jeskell, Inc., we talked about ownCloud as a provider of Enterprise File Sync and Share, and touched on why enterprises should be able to leave files where they are and provide access, rather than forcing users to push all of their file into a cloud somewhere. We also discussed ownCloud scalability, and where we see the market going – and how a partnership with IBM Software Defined Storage can have an impact for our customers. We have been doing a lot of joint work with IBM – including at some soon-to-be announced very large universities where the need to quickly scale – like a public cloud – is vital. ownCloud offers the same ease of use and fast deployment for end users as the big consumer-grade file sync and share apps, but gives IT the ability to control who sees that data, when, where and how, and with whom they can share it. This protects the data, read more … [Less]

Hi all,This week I was busy with my lectures and had a little progress on the basic playlist actions.However, I created a new branch and Pull Request on music app [0] repository on Github, then managed to fix layout issues that I have experienced ... [More] during the week.Also, since I am new to AngularJS, I had difficulties on using some methods. Today we had a short discussion with my mentor (Morris) on IRC and set up some new debugger tools (Node.js and NPM). Also discussed on problems that I had during the week. We will be solving them on Monday by latest and I am hoping to complete basic actions on playlists by the end of this week.[0] https://github.com/owncloud/music/pull/233   Here is how it looks like: [Less]