The Contributor Week is over, time to plan for the next one!

It’s time for some early planning! Some of you told us that you missed the last Contributor Week because you didn’t have time to plan for it, so we made sure to announce this one very, very early. Actually we’re even writing this post live from the last Contributors Week that happened in 2018! So this time, no excuses: We hope many of you will join us on March 11-15, 2019, in Stuttgart!

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.
The address for this meeting will be the same than for our previous Contributor Week: Nextcloud GmbH, Hirschstrasse 26, Stuttgart. Once you’re there, if the door is not open (try, it usually is), ring the bell, or let us know you’re looking for us in our #nextcloud-stuttgart IRC channel.

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!

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.
By the time we’ll meet in Stuttgart, Nextcloud 15 will have been released. Of course, it’s too early to talk about content – the downside of announcing the Contributor Week so early – but Nextcloud 16 will be on its way and there will be more than enough work to do on the new release.

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 17!

Do you want to join?

On October 30th, 2018, 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.

In any case, don’t forget to bring your laptop and help us get some work done!

We look forward to seeing ya’ll in Stuttgart!