Join us at our next Contributor Week!

Up for a last round of intense immersion with Nextcloud this year? Good news: Our next Contributor Week (formerly called Hackweek) will take place in Stuttgart from November 26th to 30th, 2018! We hope many of you will join us!

If you are new to our community or want to join: Please don’t hesitate. We are always very happy to welcome new members. You may want to check out our new Nextcloud Include program to support diversity in Open Source – more about this below.
A change from last time, the address for this meeting is Nextcloud GmbH, Hirschstrasse 26, Stuttgart. Once you’re there, ring the bell, or let us know you’re looking for us in our #nextcloud-stuttgart IRC channel.

group photo 2018

What is this Contributor Week you speak of?

If you have known Nextcloud for a while, you may have heard about these focused work weeks when we used to call them « Hackweek ». If you’re new to Nextcloud: When we kicked off our new project back in June 2016, we had a week-long get-together to discuss how to move forward together. This was both fun and productive and we decided to do more of it! The second Contributor Week already brought a few dozen people together and we’ve been growing them ever since, getting together about once every few months. During the Contributor Weeks, we focus on getting work done and being productive: going through issues, discussing and fixing them, working on our code and so on. It isn’t a time of meetings or presentations – but working. Just more together, rather than remote as we typically do! And even more togetherness in eating and drinking and having some fun, of course! Oh, and it is also the time we make these pretty pictures for our ever-growing team page and this time again, we have some new faces to add.

Of course there’s a bit of whiteboarding and architectural discussion. We also use our Contributor Week to plan for future releases or examine the state of the current one and come up with or discuss grand plans.

Focus

As usual, there’s a few topics we want to focus on during this week.

As you probably know, Nextcloud 14 was officially released on September 10th, with some new major features like Video Verification, Signal/Telegram 2FA support, many improvements to the collaboration tools as well as some great additions for those who needed help with GDPR compliance.

This time again, we are happy to see about 80.000 downloads every month so users are migrating at a high pace!

During this Contributor Week we will work on polishing the work we’re doing for Nextcloud 15, feature freeze of which we plan this month. We also hope to help people get involved and look at the state of our apps, preparing for the next release. And of course, we are looking forward to start discussing with you what the next big thing will be for Nextcloud 16!

Do you want to join?

On October 30th we released our own program to support diversity in Open Source: Nextcloud Include. With this program, we provide mentoring and internships to people from underrepresented groups in the tech community, and – even more relevant to the topic of this post – we help you to join us at events like our yearly Conference or our Contributor Week! Want to join us in Stuttgart? Check nextcloud.com/include and get in touch with us to request travel support!

Of course, even for those who aren’t part of underrepresented groups: As usual, all Nextcloud contributors are warmly welcomed to join us! For those among you where financial issues limit travel possibilities, the easiest way is to contact one of your fellow contributors who works at the company – they’ll be able to help you get some travel support! Alternatively, you can email us here.

We look forward to seeing ya’ll in Stuttgart!