Last weekend I attended the LinuxFest Northwest in Bellingham, WA for the first time and I was really impressed by the overall organization and quality of the talks.
While I was there I took the opportunity to talk about crushing data silos with ownCloud. The main point of the talk was that file sync and share should be federated and decentralized in the future, which is important for home users and big enterprises alike. I made it clear that only on-premises file sync and share services, like ownCloud, can be fully audited and integrated into existing directories or storage systems. ownCloud federation makes it possible for users to share across servers and organizations while still maintaining the security that is expected.
The attendance for my presentation was excellent, so much so that some people had to stand because the room was so jam packed that we were running out of space. But what really blew me away was the amazingly interesting discussions held following my presentation. A lot of people know and love ownCloud and expressed their agreement that the future of FSS has to be federated.
All in all this was a great event that I definitely plan to attend again next year.
