“When we have welcoming communities of contributors, open source software gets better and more useful to everyone.”

We believe in this ideal and love to work with our community. We are always looking to involve more people in Nextcloud, bringing in their ideas, creativity and efforts.

That’s why we came up with the idea to provide a fun chance to contribute through a contest:

Create a template!

Here is an opportunity for you to design a Document, Presentation or Draw template!

Templates are super helpful for our users to create content they need for work, home or personal use. Some ideas for useful templates include:

• Letters
• CVs/Resumes
• Budgets
• Newsletters
• Flyers
• Invoices
• Calendars

In this friendly contest, we’re looking for high-quality templates that are practical to use, yet inspire others to create new documents, presentations and content they love! Use your expertise, creativity and commitment to make it easier for others to write!

How? It’s super easy. Go into Nextcloud Files, click the + button and select “Set up templates folder” to create a new template folder. In there, you can create a template using Nextcloud Office!

Your work will have the chance to be featured and enjoyed by many! Read on to find out how you can submit your template!

Get inspired

Whatever motivates and inspires you, channel it into your template. Whether you’re a style and design enthusiast, love creating appeasing, visual graphics or are an outside-of-the-box program developer, this space is yours.

To help get your ideas flowing, check out these examples of some templates.

For font help, take a look at Google fonts or the Document Foundation wiki page on fonts.

For image help, check out Stocksnap.io for CC0 licensed images.

How to submit

The process is a simple as 1-2-3!

1. Create your template file and name it appropriately. For example, Invoice template.odt
2. Create a text file named info.txt with the following content:
   • your full name
   • your email address
   • the sources of the graphics, pictures, fonts, etc that you have used in your template
3. Create a zip or tarball file of the 2 files and name it in the following format: PROJECTNAME_LASTNAME_DATE. (MM-YY format). For example, your file can be named Invoice template_Doe_04-23.zip
4. Finally, just upload the compressed file below!

Just follow these rules

• The template must be made available under the Creative Common CC0 (CC0 1.0 Universal) license
• The template must not include any non-free content
• Any image or graphics used must be created on your own or be compatible with the CC0 license (if you’re not the creator of the image/graphic you must provide a proper source)
• The template must not rely on any proprietary fonts (only open source)
• The template must be created in Nextcloud; a simple conversion from a template of another tool is not allowed

We look forward to reviewing your ideas!

The deadline for submissions is May 11th.

Contest winners will be announced shortly afterward so stay tuned!

Overview

What Nextcloud template contest

When Deadline: May 11

Who Anyone can participate, anywhere in the world

Why Win to get your work featured!

The post Get your work featured in Nextcloud! appeared first on Nextcloud.

In this next podcast episode, our host Marius Quabeck speaks to a member of the Nextcloud Design Team – Nimisha Vijay. Nimisha started out as contributor through Nextcloud Include and is now on her 2nd year as part of the team.

After listening to this podcast, you will understand:

• How the Nextcloud Design Team functions and works with the community
• The journey to Nextcloud Personal – a customized look and background for your entire instance
• What happens in a Design Review Call
• Why UX is so important for inclusion
• The different resources recommended for developers and others
• How to contribute to design and Nextcloud

We hope you enjoy listening to this podcast!

The post How Nextcloud’s Design Team and Community Work Together – Listen to the Nextcloud Podcast! appeared first on Nextcloud.

Nextcloud 14 Files view

Design improvements

User interface design is about more than being pretty. The goal is to allow users to get work done with the least amount of effort, making it obvious how to accomplish tasks and reducing the number of steps needed to do so. To reduce clutter in the interface, the shares in the left sidebar are now part of a tree view, collapsed by default (but it remembers its state across sessions). The Favorites item is updated to also show a tree view of folders that are favorited and also remembers its collapse state. Have a quick look at how this works in this YouTube video:

As you see in the video, we also added a Deleted shares section. If you’re part of a group who has files shared to them and you remove such a share, you can bring them back from the Deleted shares as long as you’re in the group. Another thing you can see in the video is that we show the avatars of people who shared with you! We will cover that and other collaboration improvements in another article, stay tuned!

Other improvements include the new ‘welcome to Nextcloud’ for new users and the popup showing what’s new in this release. We also made Nextcloud work better on small screens like mobile or tablet devices!

Accessibility settings: high contrast and dark theme, special font

Accessibility

We want Nextcloud to be easy to use for everybody. To help users with visual impairments, we’ve introduced a lot of changes to improve keyboard accessibility and the screen reader experience. We introduced labels and keyboard navigation for elements like the settings and contacts menu, notifications and the upload menu as well as the addition of skip navigation/skip to content links. Much of this work was extensively tested and guided by several community members using these devices, so a big thank you to them for their contributions!

The colors used in Nextcloud have been updated to meet the WCAG 2.0 AA standard for contrast and we created themes for users who need even higher support. Our High Contrast theme aims for WCAG 2.0 AAA compliance, while a Dyslexia-friendly font option helps people with reading disability. Last but not least, a Dark theme is now available.

The accessibility changes extended to our Android apps for Files and Talk, improving their screen reader support.

We’ve documented accessibility concerns and guidelines for Nextcloud developers. We use tools like the WAVE Web Accessibility Tool, aXe and Lighthouse. It is very easy to get involved, just install them and test Nextcloud or your Nextcloud app with it, and report issues to us!

The post Nextcloud 14: the most accessible Nextcloud ever appeared first on Nextcloud.

Jan-Christoph Borchardt is an interaction designer and community manager working on Nextcloud, Open Source Design and Open Source Diversity. Jan recently delivered a talk at the Nextcloud Conference, in which he talked about the importance of diversity in the open source community. We talked to him to understand the work he is doing around diversity.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Living organisms cannot thrive and survive without diversity, can the same be said for open source communities?

Jan: Yes, absolutely. If a project wants to succeed with a big diverse audience, the community and core team also needs to be diverse. Projects led by the same profiles will give the same solutions to the same issues, even if they don’t work, and always attract the same type of profiles.

Diversity doesn’t stop at being inclusive of a diverse group, it also means being culturally sensitive towards a global community. How important is breeding a healthy culture to the prosperity of a community?

The core of open source software and community work is to make the world a better place, to work on something together. To achieve this, everyone has to be mindful and empathic of the variety there is in human experiences.

Some issues have already arisen, from vocal assistants like Alexa or Google Home only recognizing American/English or European accents; or automatic soap distributors not recognizing a Black person’s hand.

Many misinterpret diversity as if it’s creating a quota for diverse group; that’s not the case, it’s more about creating an environment where people from different cultural backgrounds, genders, races, and religions can feel comfortable to sit at the same table and build something. Can you highlight that part a bit?

Unfortunately, there’s often people who complain about diversity and inclusion initiatives – and these people are mostly the privileged people who never had to worry about structural marginalization or harassment.

Can you talk about some of the diversity related efforts that you are aware of?

Actually, some friends and I are in the process of building a platform specifically for highlighting diversity and inclusion initiatives in open source, it’s called Open Source Diversity.

People participating are Nina Cercy from our marketing team, Jona Azizaj who works on Nextcloud Contacts during RailsGirls Summer of Code, and Kristi Progri who with Jona is very active in the Albanian Open Source community as part of the Open Labs hackerspace.

Can you tell us about the efforts you are directly involved with in Nextcloud?

This year we participated in RailsGirls Summer of Code for the first time and it was a great experience. It was much more guided and as seamless as Google Summer of Code, with supervisors helping the projects and teams along the way. Our team Codeaholics worked on the Contacts app and got awesomely involved in the community, also attending the conference and giving a talk about their work

We also used Diversitytickets.org for our conference and want to do that for our development sprints as well. We regularly attend the Open Source Ladies meetup in Berlin and are available as mentors for Nextcloud. I hope we’ll also be able to participate in Outreachy again in the future. And for anyone who wants to get involved, we use the »starter issue« label to mark issues which are perfect to get started in the project.

How diverse is the Nextcloud community?

We’re not doing any specific metrics but there’s definitely an increase visible. Of course we still have a lot to do, as the open source world in general, but I’m always happy how often I hear how inclusive and friendly our community is.

You delivered a talk at the recent Nextcloud Conference. How was the response?

Very positive, and I think everyone of us is really excited about the different kinds of cool people contributing to Nextcloud.

The post Q and A with Jan-Christoph Borchardt: Importance of diversity in Open Source appeared first on Nextcloud.

We had a great design workshop at the Nextcloud Conference in Berlin! There we discussed the current design process and how to improve it even further.

Starting out we talked about how our process works currently, what we like about it, and what is happening at the moment:

• The process is already pretty open, a lot more advanced than other projects
• Everything looks very coherent, lots of apps are already properly designed
• Feedback from designers is quite helpful
• Good design issues, lots of interest
• Design label is very useful (also in other repositories)
• Cool new stuff happening in theming (by Julius)
• Calendar design work is coming along (by Raghu)
• Website redesign is in the works & awesome (by Paulo)
• New Android app improvements work nicely (by Andy & Tobias)

Questions

Then we continued with broader topics regarding the design process and general questions which are important to be clear on:

How is a design decided on?

• Consistency with existing apps, components and interaction design
• Review of existing solutions, other software people use
• Input from designers and design-minded developers
• No decision bottlenecks! Sure there is Jan but don’t be blocked

How to approach a new feature?

• Ideally involve design from the very beginning
• If it’s very small, feel free to already work on it
• Ideal is something visual: either a mockup or prototype
• Design also always happens in the respective repository issue tracker, no separate design repo

Where is design help needed? / How do I ask for design help?

• Check out the design label in the repositories
• Also combined with the starter issue label for easy issues to get into Nextcloud
• And lastly the papercut label: for small issues which are often encountered but relatively easy to fix, hence providing a big UX improvement.
• All these tags are also available in the repositories of the individual apps like ? Mail, ? Calendar, ? Android app and others.

Improvements

We identified two key areas where we need to do more regarding design: blogging & documentation!

This will make it easier for designers to get involved, as well as help developers and other contributors understand how we do design at Nextcloud. It also aims to clear up the general design process questions from above directly from the start for any new contributor.

Blogging about design

We want to publish more design-focused blog posts and highlight contributors, for example:

• Design improvements to the Calendar by Raghu
• Awesome simple Theming by Julius
• Android app interface developments by Andy & Tobias
• Our new website by Paulo
• Your blog about a Nextcloud design enhancement?

Design documentation

• Goal is a nice nextcloud.com/design landing page
• It should explain some basics of how we handle design, similar to as we did on the old website at /contribute/design/
• We also need a proper styleguide, going from general practice down to components like #app-navigation, popovers and icon usage.
• In that respect we also need to improve our existing CSS & HTML documentation with proper title & structure and link to it
• Felix kicked off the collection and discussion at https://github.com/nextcloud/nextcloud.com/pull/140

So join us and get involved! Everyone is welcome in the Nextcloud design team Especially front-end folks with knowledge of HTML, CSS and Javascript are always needed. ?

Written by Jan-Christoph Borchardt from the Nextcloud design team. Follow him on Twitter!

The post Nextcloud design team updates! :) appeared first on Nextcloud.