Have you ever noticed how different people’s minds work? Here’s an example: When you ask people to ‘picture eggs on toast’, and then let them describe what they pictured, you will soon notice that they will have pictured very different things. Some will have pictured eggs sunny side up, others scrambled eggs or Eggs Benedict… when it comes to community, this is similar. People have very different views and understandings of what community is about. With regards to the example of the eggs and the toast, one thing is for sure: it is food.
The same counts for community. Community is essentially about people interacting with eachother. These people have something in common, a certain interest. The ownCloud project was born out of a joint idea from a group of techies, who had the same passion for technology and who wanted to offer a solution to users – the choice to share files and sync them whilst always having control over their data. Especially in this day and age where public clouds are dominating the cloud world, we believe that it is more important than ever to have a choice, as a business, an organization, institution or even as an individual. The choice, to know what happens to your data and to be able choose to have control over this data is something we see as essentially important, to be digitally sovereign.
ownCloud offers a freedom of choice for users – a freedom of choice which was born out of a joint open source community spirit. Even though the company ownCloud has evolved in the past years, and is now also offering enterprise features and support, community is – and always has been – at its core. The wish to interact with community is predominant to this day, as well as our mission to stay true to our principles and beliefs that Open Source is the way to go. Data sovereignty is our driving factor for how and why we do the things we do at ownCloud. With this underyling spirit, the new platform: ownCloud Infinite Scale is currently being developed by our engineers. OwnCloud Infinite Scale is at tech preview stage and we are looking forward to making this innvovative platform generally available later this year. With ownCloud Infinite Scale, a new era begins at ownCloud and we are eager to engage with the community and gather feedback and insights.
There are many ways on how you can get engaged, contribute and join us on our quest for digital sovereignty. You do not have to be a deep dive techie in order to be able to engage in the ownCloud community space. We welcome all sorts of contributions such as translations, guest blog articles as well as code contributions and many more. Our community consists of technology partners, Service and Hosting Providers as well as many administrators, developers and users across the world who contribute to the community in many different ways.
If you are passionate about community, open source technology, digital sovereignty and you are curious to find out more about our ‘new thing in the making’ and how you can get engaged, then have a read about our new community program we launched in late 2021. We also have an Early Adopter program specifically for ownCloud Infinite Scale. If you have any question feel free to contact us directly and don’t forget: there are many ways on how you can engage in community, just like there are many ways on how you can prepare your fried eggs!
I would like to take this opportunity to also point out two upcoming community events where ownCloud will be present with speakers or as a sponsor:
- Chemnitzer Linux Tage with Klaas Freitag, CTO giving a talk: “ownCloud Infinite Scale – the new private Clour for you”
- The Linux Presentation Day and the Tux-Tage
The above mentioned events are in German, however, for a list of upcoming events (including international ones) where ownCloud will actively participate, please go to our new events page. Please also feel free to visit our blog and stay up to date by following us on Social Media!
