 All right, so please give a warm welcome to Nimesha who is going to guide us through this session as our Moderator and Nimesha has been an integral part of next cloud community. You all know her for quite some time Initially she joined as a contributor and now serving as our brilliant UX designer So we are also excited to introduce our panelists Marsil and James They will share about their incredible journey of contributions So get ready to be inspired and curious about how you can start making your mark in the world of next cloud So to you Nimesha So those of us who are also there for last year's conference may have seen something similar moderated by my lovely colleague Jan I can't see right now but The reason we have this is because the community is such an integral part of next cloud and you know an open source in general as we just saw it's such a powerful part of what we do and You know might be nice to highlight some of the you know people who have been a part of the community and see the journey so Marsil James, thank you so much for joining us over here today and Maybe we can just start off with some introductions So why don't we you know to just talk about what what you've been doing and how you're associated with next cloud, so Okay, welcome everyone We're here for a lightning talks this morning had seen me already My name is myself say soon engineer with next cloud since this year and before being a long year Contributed to next cloud with severed open source apps As I mentioned before first I started with the audio player thing is even like nine years ago almost Or something like this audio player and then recently like four years ago started with the analytics app like your open source reporting with the next load Yeah, this was my journey where it Got into touch with the app store app development for for next load Nice and James Lately things have been so I moderate on the next cloud forum And I also do testing and I've written a lot of documentation and done community management for next-cloud pie and Previously I did a lot of testing for different apps in next-cloud and These days I feel like the platform is pretty strong and I think the documentation is much improved so it's been more just about helping like people through the forum and to have a better experience in like reporting bugs and providing logs and getting the Information that helps developers to get fixes or to help find contributors to submit pull requests Super cool, and you also mentioned that you are associated with next-cloud pie in your You know very cool Lightning talk and those of you are joining online if you haven't seen that both go see both of their lightning talks. It was very cool so that was very much like a Community project that you found right like it already existed. How did that work for you? How do you come across it and why do you choose to sort of contribute? In the forums and documentation rather than code which is sort of the first thing that we think about when we think about contributions Yeah, honestly, this is something I just do in my off-time. I Am a 100% volunteer on all this isn't this is just something I do for fun in my free time Never did it to tell anyone about it Yeah, but I've been a part of a lot of community spaces my background actually I'm a trained mime and clown a theater performer and musician and I have a Also background in writing and so I found this is like a introverted thing that I could do on the side It's fun. It's different from that, but I still get wrapped back into community and engagement and Yeah, I like making things easier for for people if something's confusing to me I'd rather help fix that and make it clearer for everyone else and that's never changed for me I'm still into Helping others make it easier and I feel like next cloud pie makes the process of running next cloud easier for home Non-technical users, so that's why I'm drawn to it. Nice and on the flip side Marcel you made a whole app Which is basically just court So that's pretty cool. I mean obviously there's design and documentation as well So, I mean how is your experience contributing or sort of developing a whole whole app? Which I mean I as a designer That's like so off-limits for me. I'm like, I don't know what you're doing So how that go what is was there something in your background that helped you do that or you know? Was it something you were just tinkering around and you just found? Yeah, I think at the beginning it's a lot of try and error and search for existing apps Which do like somehow what you are achieving to do because if you complete completely new to this topic I was like really like and let's say Amateur developer learning some PHP on my own and if you then for the first time go into Classes functions, whatever it can really challenging. So for the first time you search for apps, which are doing similar topic What do you want to achieve? Stick together the bits and pieces and then you know hope that it's working and then then come from there So really like the feature of open source that all the old that the source code is available on github Is then a feature because this will be your reference because at the beginning you're if you're not a pro You will start collecting the piece of from everywhere And then the second point is always The community itself, of course you have the big community the help forum that that you mentioned and also Sounds like a little bit self advertising now, but also what's very helpful is that next load itself is also supporting the community If there are some more tricky questions There are always some of the next load engineers also supporting you on your on really whenever it comes to Technical details when you want to do try something what was not done in any reference apps So it's very helpful that next lot also Dedicate some of their engineers to to the community to support them and also answer them with their technical question Or also inexperience to bring them further so that your next employees also take part of the of the help forum And it's not like we do the internal stuff and help with external and community so it's more more integrated into each other And I think this is very Valuable if you start looking into into next load that you also have to have your your back covered by by next load itself Yeah, I've used the forum a lot for you know some you know thinking about what features we could do I think there was a really nice post that you open about photos I think it was right it was you and it was just like a whole big post So I think the forum is a really nice way to Contribute and you're super active on that and you know, how long have you been involved with next learn? I'm not quite sure anymore, but I guess well, so I Saw some contributions from 2017 recently, so I guess back that long I remember I was hearing about own cloud at Linux Fest Northwest back in 2015 So I guess that was previous to the fork to next cloud But yeah, the post of the forum really work. There was a really cool I would say the coolest forum discussion that I've had that because it actually meant something was having a discussion with one of the developers I Guess I won't say his name, but we have a discussion on the on the forum in regards to integrating different things together And we were talking about integrating the apps So what's the way to do that you test all of the different apps you test all the different functionality And then we write up what was supported what wasn't supported with things like the project's functionality Which is now deprecated, but it's like how do we make this better? So you have a discussion on a specific topic and make it like wiki editable and encourage contributions and as people kept adding ideas that led to a design call and So I had a design call at 5 a.m. Or something with with a next cloud design team and They were and we were talking about integrating the apps together And they were talking about a way to call an action and they were thinking of using I think like a hash mark or something and then you'd be able to do an action and We had this call and then they were thinking about using a slash and It didn't like nothing specifically happened from it It's kind of like well, what was that call but then fast forward a year or something later this we continued this discussion in github But and other people had similar experiences, but all these things led to the smart picker functionality so these discussions led to the smart picker where you call an action to do a thing and There's other discussions to be involved, but for us specifically it was how do we integrate all these things together? I'm in one app, but I want to do something else What do I do and so sometimes these discussions are really fruitful? But the best way to do that is that you have the discussions in the forum and then in github and you you know keep everything interconnected so Discussions can happen in the right place so people can see them as it helps both the community But also the developers themselves and what they end up wanting to implement Yeah, I think it's also a very important topic what you mentioned because this is it that design review call We're just scheduled by the design team from next load is very helpful I had one of my apps also being in there So you have an app you're proud of it and then your request from the next load design team Can we have a design review call of it? Takes for one hour and then you have a really long to-do list You're a little depressed after you're a little depressed afterwards like oh shit Do I have to redesign my half and half of my app? But it's really valuable because if you stick to your view of something It's not necessarily what other people might think of UI or user integration So what you mentioned the design design call is one of these Yeah, one of these topics that were next up offers them some support for there for the community also Which is very valuable to get also insights Yeah, yeah, I'm excited and then so Hello clock on Tuesdays Berlin time if you want to drop in please do it's always exciting Yeah, so I mean you said you've been like working like doing open source for about nine years Which is a really long time So how has what changes have you seen or you know like how how how has your journey been because it's that's super interesting to me because I got involved only you know a few Years ago and I've already seen a lot of change because I think some of this design review call and stuff It kept evolving. So how did how was how's your experience changed over the years? I think that's super interesting. I mean first that obvious change was at the beginning when I was doing my first step The audio player it was still hosted for exclusively for for on cloud back then Okay, so that that old is the back end of the of the app already Then there was the time when there was the fork to next cloud and you were like will it work? Will it not to work at the beginning you were trying hard Because the wind is not sure which way you went so trying hard to have one app being supported still by both landscapes fighting hard to be here go like Bidirectional sooner or later decided that okay only go one route So this was like like the first obvious change that that everything shifted and from there Also, you could recognize that the one solution was they are getting much more advanced in the development And then you're pretty soon afterwards. They were not compatible with the other each other anymore So let's say the other solution was then faced out. So this was like that the biggest change. Yeah, oh Interesting. Oh my god. That's something that I can't you know, I'm too young for this No, what about what about you James? What do you want to know? Yeah, like how's your experience? Changed over over the years that you Was then own cloud pie Well at the time I didn't want to use on cloud because because of the not open components That's so for me. I think I always want to use Open tools and it's not always possible But for me, that's really important and I think one thing that's changed for me Like when I talk to people about something like GDPR in the United States, they don't understand what I'm talking about But one of the things that they do understand is that I think people have the right to be forgotten When you're a part of something you have the right to take your data and to walk and I think that's really important and So I want to use tooling where people have the ability to leave They're not etched in stone forever doesn't mean they didn't have an impact there But they need personally to be able to go yeah away like a right to change your identity and flee And I can't believe how difficult that is to do in in software. It's and the internet and in our life It's it's really hard So I think things like that are like an ongoing Challenge and one of the things I like about this platform is and I want more of even Personally is just for people to be able to interact with it who are not users who do not have an account Who do not want an account and never will have an account But I still want to be able to engage with those people right people who don't know what next cloud is Like I think that I always want those people to be engaged and have the same kind of experience Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think there's a lot a bit more awareness about this sort of things right now, too I think you know with legislation as Simon just said there's more people are recognizing that the sort of Privacy aware and open source technologies are actually important to people and important to society So there is a lot more people coming into open source as well So, I mean if there's someone new coming in I mean given Your all your experience, I guess like how is the best way that they can help out right now? So for maybe like someone who's similar to you with not a lot of background So if there was someone completely new who was like this this is important to me, how would they how could they help out? Number one way people can help out is to use these things you have to try try tools You have to try things and you have to find what works for you. It's gonna be different for every person But you find projects that you love and especially if you find a project and you want to Work with others not just to have something for the sake. I think of consumption. It's great But you realize like oh if if there's collaboration if that's if you want collaboration then that is somewhere where? Open source and also free software. I'm talking like fsf free style software can be really helpful And it's still a challenge to develop and to make available and for people to know about it But I think it's a it's a worthy challenge, especially when you find a tool you really like Absolutely, and what do you think? I think it's very important if you want to get into the topic What would you said use the software because developers developer software from their point of view But the more people they you are using the software the more business cases the more use cases You will have for the software and the more like also unplanned events for for user interaction and user exchange you have and There's a more thing use the software See where the second software resolution can help you for really a personal need and and then start from this one because then you Get involved and you're personally interested if you if you say you want to contribute you go to GitHub search for the first 100 tickets and simply try to work them from top to bottom I think this will not work because this will simply not motivate you This was when I first came in for the audio player. The reason was like I needed an audio player for for the kids That was easy usable. That's where that the audio player was originally made of that the kids had a simple solution to Click on there on the cover arts on another tablet So you need a personal use case to be personally Motivated to contribute I think this this is the entrance because then after a while you get more into the leaders You're more familiar and then you're more tolerant to let's say not the interesting topics They're boring topics like something else a challenging topic like testing and documentation as we all know but first You need a personal connection to it to your target to your aim because without it's very theoretical work I think yeah, I mean even for for me. I actually started You know contributing to next cloud because I just was interested in design and next I had a design presence So I just dropped in on some of the design review calls and I was like, this is really cool So I think that personal investment is super important and I think speaking of liking design stuff What do you like about contributing? So I mean right now you work for the team as well, but you did start off as a Contributor, so maybe you can talk about what are the nice things about contributing? Of course the nicest thing if you if you're depends on what so it's a my case of contributing an app developing an app The nicest thing is always if you look at the statistics If you if you hand out a new release and then later you look at the at your github statistics And you're happy. Let's if you see that your your app gets downloaded like audio player the map seem almost like 30,000 downloads or whatever over a longer period. So this one is really what keeps you motivated if you get feedback in General it's very hard to get really user feedback that because when it uses come back to you It's more likely when they file an issue be some because something is not working It's not very often that users open a ticket and say hey great that you used it It's more so that's more kind of the negative feedback you normally yet But if you've been looking at the numbers at the adoption rate at the download numbers, I think this is very very motivational Thing to to get continued things in for you I think for me the best part about contributing is that it Things do improve and it just can take time. It can be a slow game I realized it's I've gotten into fermentation and I feel like Contributing to open platforms is a lot like doing fermentation where you Try different experiments and then you check in with them a week later two weeks later a month later a year later It's it's a slower process and and you're always trying to fine-tune and and find Ways to better contribute and to encourage others But I think the truth is when something great happens it basically It just becomes the new norm and every time you do something. That's really great it's basically the things that people don't notice because everything works and everything is fine and That's really the sign that you did a great job Well, when something is is you know is working and it's gotten that fine polish after a lot of development and Contributions and a lot of time, but then it's like There's also a short memory Collectively of the experience and we just sort of live in the now of how where everything's at And the expectation expectations are also rising so the people after a while and if you deliver some quality They expect you to continue to deliver the product the quality. So you set yourself your burden even higher So, yeah, that's quite some challenge But that's where other contributors also come in when you know, like if you make a product That's really good. If you make up or something. That's really good The pressure on you sort of raises as you said But there's also more people who are coming in and using this up and they're like, oh, that's actually really cool Maybe I can help out. So I think that's kind of how you build a community as well So, I mean, that's that's one thing that I really like a lot of people just drop in because they find something cool And then that's it. That's it's purely out of like they find something cool. And I think that's really nice. Yep Yeah, sorry, we're gonna say something. Oh, just I Was just mulling all that over and I think I think one of the things that's really tricky with With these kinds of projects is it's hard not to put an undue amount of burden on an individual I think it's really hard when someone's working on something for it not to be piled piled on to them like all of the stress of something gets basically ends up on on a person and You know, then you get into issues of like burnout and like maintenance burden is a lot and I think that's something that's always That's something I would think that's always a goal is to try to lessen that burden on on specific individuals and make them feel like they still have a Life and they still have flexibility and you know, because that you're contributing to an open project Whether you're a paid employee or it's some random person on the internet and it's easy to lose site of that I think Within the greater community Yeah, I think sometimes sometimes also for the expectation by the users When they see you are developing an app. It's your free time. It's your it's your personal free time you're investing and Only because of one user has a use case which is not working He can make like a big fast on GitHub in a GitHub ticket as it's the most important error ever found in in the world But for you as a use case or for all the thousand other users This is not really a real error because you don't didn't have any any further report for this So it's yeah, some of us can be tricky to Yeah, to bring the message to it to users or issue trackers to tell them here Yes, I understand your issue, but it might not be the biggest priority it's for you but not for the others and the same part of time you still want to be polite and not not simply block them, but Sometimes it can also be challenging because they're also There are people in the space that are not that Yeah I think In your liking talk to be patient, I guess and I think that that applies from every Every party involved over here the maintainer the user and the person who wants to contribute or open an issue as well So that aspect of you know things sort of take time is I think you know Kind of something that I've learned with an open source project. So maybe What were sort of what would help so You you've you've done this for a while So you've talked about some of these things that maybe were barriers or things that were maybe not super nice or contributing So what would have helped if You know or did you see some things that were implemented? You said that there was a really cool thing that happened once and then that was sort of the that was sort of the You know standard after that so maybe we can share some things about how like how things changed as improvements And how they made you feel better or what you wish would have happened You have one so think about it Well, one of the things I know that was that is available in the next cloud pie project That's really useful as we have a thing called ncp report and it's a script and you can run it at any time and it generates the info about what version of next cloud you're using PHP and And gives the log error info and everything so you have the information needed to supply it over So you actually give useful feedback So I think tooling like that is really useful and then that's why improving documentation is useful too to help guide when Someone does want to file a bug report or something finding ways to make that process more productive and and more streamlined So that the information is going to the developer and they don't have to ask for clarification They can just get the information that's needed and I think that's an ongoing target I think it's as always they should like proactive error reporting or proactive issue issue issue tracing It's always easy to say like here. This doesn't work. What's happening in the analytics app here? I connected the data source. It doesn't work and I say, okay. Yes, this information is like 100% worthless because I don't know information. I don't have a debug log I don't have anything so it's it's Yeah, interesting to get the information you need as a because you're willing to support That the issue tracker, but you're yours. You also need some information now But I think after what you get that you get the people to provide information or you get the get your tickets Better commented and then it's on the on the right way. Yeah, I Sort of have us like similar. I don't know experience but from a design side where someone says You know we can do this to make it better And I think a lot more times it's helpful to say why it's a problem That's kind of like the error report for a user experience So what issue is this and why it is a problem and that helps define the solution a bit better So I kind of understand, you know, the whole error report thing Well in regards to that so one of the things that it's what we talked about last year at the conference for next-club pie is just Getting involved in the forum the real reason for that was in order to expand next-club pie's presence there because we were tired of people Asking us questions in a chat. We have a chat because people want a chat, but that's not really helpful to have a chat It's nice, but outside of that It's not helping and because no one's going back through telegram to search the history to find information That's gonna help them so instead what we did was Built a presence in the forum itself and that regard and that involved Learning about discourse the software Plot the free software platform for the forum Understand how that worked and then developing some tooling for that which helped us on the forum So then as a moderator creating a way for users to ask questions and also to basically join a Group to co-write and improve our documentation moving forward But all they needed was access to the forum and that's where all of our problems are like questions for where people's individual Instances that's where those questions can be answered because their problems are honestly just regular next-cloud problems They're not specific really to our platform those those kinds of questions really go in a github repo, but that's That's not That doesn't have really anything to do of somebody setting up an app and then their apps not working It's like that doesn't matter if you're using the Nicob pie or the snap or whatever it doesn't matter It's more about understanding the configuration of that app Which means they need to be a part of the larger conversation in the forum And so we did that and that is a great thing because then we don't have questions about that in the chat anymore And that goes away and that's great because it was a huge burden Oh, so I mean that sounds like you sort of simplified how people were communicating and That seems like a sort of recurring issue with a lot of projects as well where users Maybe don't have a proper way to give feedback because github is too technical or the people who are on github don't Maybe have the same experience as you know my mom for example, so I think solving that problem of communication was one of Are we okay? So solving that problem of communication is something that's really important and keeps contributors Motivated as well because for me finding a chart on talk was something that was really helpful When I first started getting involved in next cloud But I think there's also the way you get because if you come back to the original purpose here how to contribute I think there's also the entrance level because if you have everything in a forum And all the all the questions that are answered there But first that the people who are using the app or perhaps advanced users are in these forums So and there's not no better experience if you see a question You have no as the maintainer or something You know don't have time to answer right away And then you come back after some hours and some yet some other users Start to to answer the user questions there There's no better thing because this is a sign as someone else also got involved Understood the application and other people also interact each other and I and answer each other other questions And I think this is the first level because if you're if you're able to answer other users questions You understand the solution and this is like the first entry step, but most likely They will also look into more details and more technical challenges To come back to what we initially said if you want to contribute use it use it understand it then you can like come from the Understanding from the usability questions and to technical questions and then sooner or later Hopefully you're digging into code lines or whatever and then it can't really contributing on a technical side to To an app or a distribution with documentation testing or really code reviews And I think having this one is the we are using it understanding it and interacting. That's the first entrance level I would say Nice super cool. I mean we have 10 minutes left So I think we can start wrapping up slowly You said that you were involved in a bunch of other things outside of next cloud as well So maybe we can talk about our experiences contributing to some other open-source projects And were there any super positive things that we can maybe learn from that? I Just wanted to go back. Sorry. Oh Contributing thing I just want to say the the barrier of entry to contributing in this circumstances as low as it can Possibly be in terms of engaging with the developers and with the company and with the projects and like yourself and I think that that's important for people to Understand because it seems like it's a whole World to engage in but the good news is that the barrier is very low to join something like github and to Make a fork a project and to make changes and submit them back It becomes more complex in terms of sending back changes that you will understand as the developer or that That will be helpful to you if I'm trying to push, you know a pull request to you to for a fix And I think that's that process is like an ongoing process where you you try things you Try fixes and you're also learning to code or getting better at coding following a design And it's just kind of an ongoing process and I think people just have to embrace it and Keep keep trying and it's it's really not hard to get started, but I think it is an art form to hone Yeah, fully agree after the first successful distributions. Hopefully you learn that is not that bad From there it continues from answering the first user question to first feature request or whatever And then you have a That's the aim. Yep Is this off in terms of other projects? So many other projects. I think if you use something if you want to use a tool you should just use it and try Try and fail. So if you try setting up You know this tool on a toaster and it runs poorly Then you can dig into why that is or you can find other tooling and Don't just presume that other tools aren't useful or that they're not worth trying like if you've tried Next cloud you can try own cloud which was ported to go And I don't know if anyone else has heard this but I've heard in the past people thinking well now that own cloud Is ported to go next cloud is obsolete. Well, obviously that is not true because the project is not obsolete Here we are And it's way more complex than that and there's different advantages to different tools or you can try syncing or Are sync and you can try all these different tools and they'll have different benefits to you or you can just try something totally unrelated and Try to find how things work together best for yourself. It just makes you a better contributor the more diversity you have and Experiences I think helps. Yeah, absolutely In people open PR is across just a whole bunch of different projects and all of them are in the same Vane, but they all have their own advantages and I think that's you know in the end all All of open source is sort of fighting the same fight. So I think that's really helpful as well And I think for our last question I mean you have any closing thoughts like I Really want to just highlight how cool it is that there is so much People out here who are just contributing on their free time. I started off doing that Marsha start out doing that You're continuing to do that. I mean, what can we I mean, what can we learn from each other? I mean Simply do it simply give it a try as I said search something what we have a relationship to and Sooner or later, you will success automatically you will have success It's that simple search for for something you like and then you will we will get involved in it. It's Give it a try. It's not that hard Yeah, and I think there's a lot of fun tools to that work together like Next cloud is a project is a fun project, but it's not that's not only that's only part of it It's like next cloud is more of an an interface But then you can extend it by if you're interested in file systems You can look into things like true nas or if you want to learn about networking You can build firewall appliances and all these things can work together But they all kind of solve different issues which can co-relate, but it also helps you learn more and stay inspired We're thinking about that the use cases Probably we're running a foundation a public foundation and then we also integrate next law because foundation obviously open source is Good to be used in foundation because we are not using license costs So it's like it's not like the solution is also thinking about where you can possibly Additional where you have an additional use for the solution and the whole foundation on our side is run on top of next law for this so it's a kill yeah Combination of open source NGO for example, so there can be additional use cases Yeah, very very wide range of possibilities just just deploying something a project that you're You know passionate about and using it for different use cases is also a Really good way of contributing because it's spreading the word about how all the different ways it can be used And even today in all the different lightning talks We saw that you can you know you can translate you can work on documentation you can just open issues You can help out on the forum you can do design. That's what I do. You can build apps They're totally like workshops, you know, you can organize stuff like you know meetups like this So there are a lot of ways to contribute and if you would like to find out more There's the link you can go to next law comm slash contribute and you'll be able to see all the different ways You can get involved and there are three minutes left But I don't have anything to say so I think we can wrap it up. We good Thank you