NUUG 2021-11-04: Frank Karlitchek - Why Open Source is the key for Privacy and Digital Sovereignty
Channel: NUUG
Date: 04/11/2021

The security and the personal data on the internet are under attack by hackers and international espionage programs. The question who controls what data and application becomes more important every day. And governments care more and more about Digital Sovereignty and how this effects the future of countries.

The GDPR was supposed to give people more control over their data. But now that the European Court of Justice declared the US CloudAct incompatible with the GDPR the question arises how data should be stored and processed in the future.

The Nextcloud community is building an open source and fully federated and distributed network for files and communication. Everyone can run a Nextcloud server at home or somewhere on the internet and collaborate and share with everyone else. Nextcloud can be used to provide file access, syncing, sharing, calendar, contacts, video calling, music and video streaming in a distributed way.

This talk will cover the current problems with surveillance and espionage, and strategies on how to fix this problem. It will also discuss the current and upcoming federation features of Nextcloud and how to become a part of the community.



Frank Karlitschek is a long time open source developer and former board member of the KDE e.V. In 2016 he founded Nextcloud to create a full open source decentralized alternative to big centralized US cloud companies. In 2012 he initiated the User Data Manifesto to define basic human rights regarding personal data. Frank was an invited expert at the W3C to help create the ActivityPub internet standard. Frank has spoken at MIT, CERN, Harvard and ETH, and keynoted several conferences. Frank is the founder and CEO of Nextcloud GmbH. He is also a fellow of Open Forum Europe and an advisor to the United Nations regarding Intellectual Property and Open Source.