Originally published at: Nextcloud and its community take the lead in making sovereignty available for everyone - Nextcloud
When we founded the company in 2016, our vision was to provide people and organizations willing to take back control over their data with a real sovereign collaboration platform.
Thanks to the Nextcloud community, this has become a reality while Nextcloud as a company is still entirely independent, growing organically without external investors.
It is great to see that this movement is still growing at a time when the current global political situation calls for alternatives to Big Tech. At the end of September, we welcomed more than 400 community members to our annual Community Conference in Berlin, Germany.
Private initiatives can effect rapid change
During the year, numerous political initiatives have emerged with the aim of creating sovereign IT offerings. While we welcome this development, we know that political decisions take time, which we don’t have.
This is why we have decided to take the lead ourselves and invest €250 million euros until 2030 to reach the next level. This money will be spent more on brain power and genuine collaboration than on infrastructure.
- People and brainpower: We aim to expand our global workforce, particularly in the engineering department, hiring hundreds of new developers. The goal is to further optimize Nextcloud Hub in terms of performance, stability, and feature diversity. Each release makes big strides, and we intend to do more, not less!
- Empower the community: The community is our engine room. This is why we plan to support and grow the Nextcloud community and the broader open source community. Think of initiatives like our Include initiative, events like our conference, our work on the All-in-One image for easy deployment, our developer resources and more.
- Sovereign ecosystem: Sovereignty can only be achieved collectively. We plan to expand our global partner ecosystem and strengthen existing partnerships, creating an industry-wide sovereignty movement. Examples are our partner program, collaborations like the recently announced IONOS Nextcloud Workspace and our leadership as co-founders in the EuroStack Initiative and more.
- Educate and inform: We will expand our collaboration with partners and civil society organizations to educate the public about privacy, security, and digital sovereignty. We will advocate the benefits of transparency, open standards, and open code. Think of projects like the Digital Sovereignty Index and of course just spreading the word on amazing organizations that roll out digitally sovereign solutions like Austria’s ministry of Economics!
Seeing how an idea has grown into the world’s most popular privacy-focused collaboration platform with the help of a great community makes us extremely proud and grateful. We welcome everyone who joins the movement and helps to ensure that digital sovereignty becomes more widespread in the coming years.
You can find more information about how to contribute here: https://nextcloud.com/contribute.