On September 19–20, the Nextcloud Conference 2026 celebrated ten years since the project was founded. I was there, like I have been at almost every conference since 2016, and this year felt like a good moment to look back at what that decade actually looked like from the seat of a community volunteer, not a developer.
I didn't come to Nextcloud as a developer, and I still don't write code for the project. I'm not sure that detail matters much anymore, but it mattered a lot when I started, so it's worth saying up front: everything below was built by someone who joined a mailing list, not a codebase.
2016: A project with no product yet
I joined the Nextcloud community in 2016, the same year the project was announced. There was no polished product to point to yet, mostly a fork, a name, and a lot of people arguing, in a good way, about what the software should become. What I remember most from that period isn't a feature or a release date. It's the feeling of designing something out loud, in public, before it existed. We weren't reacting to a roadmap someone else had written. We were the ones sketching it.
It's worth explaining why that specific moment mattered so much, because it's easy to romanticize "the early days" of any project after the fact. The reason it mattered is practical, not sentimental: when a project has no product yet, the only thing it has is the people arguing about what it should be. Whoever shows up to that argument ends up shaping the outcome, whether or not they ever touch the source code. I showed up mostly on lists and forums, asking questions and translating whatever documentation existed into Greek, and that was enough to be part of the room where decisions were being discussed. That's a very different kind of access than joining a mature project ten years in, where the architecture, the governance, and the culture are already set. I got in while all of that was still wet cement.
That's also the year I went to my first Nextcloud Conference at all, and I owe that to my friend Jos, who suggested I go. I did, and then I kept doing it every year after. If you had told me at that first conference that I'd still be doing this a decade later, I would have believed you, the pull of that early, unfinished-project energy is hard to describe unless you've felt it yourself.
Contributing without writing a single line of code
I hadn't studied computer science and I didn't know how to program, so my path into the project was documentation and translation into Greek, and from there into promotion and marketing. It took me a while to stop apologizing for that, internally, as if it were a lesser way to contribute. It isn't. Open source projects need people who can explain what the software does to someone who isn't already convinced, and they need that explanation in more than one language. If you're reading this and you don't code but you use open source software, that gap (documentation, translation, outreach) is very likely still open, and it's real work, not a consolation prize.
Here's the part that surprised me: translation work turns out to be a form of testing. You cannot translate a settings page, an error message, or a setup guide accurately if you don't actually understand what the software does at that point, which means every string you translate is also a small audit of whether the software explains itself clearly in the first place. More than once, working through a Greek translation surfaced an English string that was ambiguous or outright wrong, and reporting that back was a contribution in itself, one that had nothing to do with writing code and everything to do with reading closely. Marketing and community outreach work the same way: you can't convince a skeptical sysadmin to trust self-hosted cloud software with a slogan. You need to actually understand their objections, which means listening at conferences and user group meetups long before you ever stand up to give a presentation. None of that shows up in a commit history, but all of it shapes whether a project survives contact with real users.
Over the years I put a lot of that energy specifically into Greece: encouraging people to contribute in whatever way fit them, and just as importantly, encouraging them to go to a bigger event and meet the wider community instead of only knowing the project through me. I think that part worked. I'm no longer the only connection point between Greek users and Nextcloud, and that was the actual goal.
FOSSCOMM, FOSDEM, and the habit of showing up
Some of that outreach happened at home, at FOSSCOMM in Greece. Some of it happened further away, at FOSDEM. Different audiences, same instinct: if you want people to trust a project, you show up in person and answer their questions, rather than waiting for them to find the documentation on their own.
The two events actually complement each other in a way that isn't obvious until you've done both for a few years. FOSSCOMM is small, local, and personal, the kind of event where you recognize half the room, and where a Greek-language conversation about self-hosting a Nextcloud instance for a small NGO can turn into a real deployment within a few weeks, because you can follow up with that person directly. FOSDEM is the opposite: enormous, international, overwhelming in the best way, and much less about individual conversions than about visibility, making sure Nextcloud has a booth, a talk, a presence in a room full of thousands of open source developers who might otherwise never think about it. You need both. The local event builds trust you can act on quickly, the international one builds the reputation that makes people take the local event seriously in the first place.
The years we skipped
I didn't attend in person between roughly 2020 and 2023. Travel was restricted for part of that stretch, and honestly, even once it wasn't, I was still a little wary of being in a crowded room, which felt like a completely reasonable response at the time and still does in hindsight. What I didn't do was disappear from the community. Every conference that ran online during those years, I watched. The format changed, the habit of showing up didn't.
The people behind the project
Ten years of conferences means ten years of watching a community's faces change, and that change tells its own story about the project's health. Some people I met early on have since moved to different jobs, different projects, different lives, but I still run into plenty of the old crowd every year. What's newer is seeing more people at the conference who are actually employed by Nextcloud the company. That's not a loss of the old spirit, it's what it looks like when a project grows enough to need full-time hands. A ten-year-old open source project with no paid staff at all would be a much more worrying story than the one Nextcloud is telling.
Some of those faces are personal, too. I was genuinely happy to run into Eirini again, I'd met her at a previous conference, where she was already working at Nextcloud as the person organizing the project's events and conferences. Seeing her leading that work, and doing it well, was a small but real reminder of how much a smooth-running conference depends on people.
This year I traveled with a fellow university student, Giorgos, who was at his first Nextcloud Conference and, from what I could tell, is already sold. He's not just planning to use the software, he's talking about contributing to specific features, which is exactly the trajectory the project needs more of. I also ran into an old friend from my Google Summer of Code days, Fani, who's now working in Berlin. Conferences are supposed to be about talks and roadmaps, but honestly, a lot of what makes ten years of them worth it is exactly this, the specific people you keep crossing paths with.
A bigger room, and what gets lost in a bigger room
This year's conference passed 500 attendees, and the venue changed to accommodate it, bigger overall, and critically, with more rooms running in parallel. That's a good problem to have, but it's still a trade-off worth naming honestly. More simultaneous tracks means missing sessions you actually wanted to see, because they overlapped with something else you also wanted to see. My hope, is that most of what I missed will show up online afterward. Growth is good. It also means you can't be in two rooms at once, and no amount of enthusiasm fixes that.
It's worth pausing on the number itself, because 500 attendees at a single-vendor open source conference, ten years in, is a genuinely meaningful signal, not a metric. A lot of open source projects either stay permanently small, run by the same handful of maintainers indefinitely, or get acquired and absorbed into a bigger platform where the community conference quietly disappears. Nextcloud has done neither. It's stayed independent, kept its own conference growing year over year, and reached a size where the organizers had to solve a genuinely different logistical problem (more parallel tracks) rather than just a bigger single room. That's the kind of growing pain that only shows up once a project has actually made it past the fragile early-stage phase, and it's a much better problem to be managing in year ten than the alternative.
A live band instead of pizza
Small detail, but it stuck with me. The Saturday party had a live band this year, instead of the pizza that's been the usual move in past years. It wasn't necessarily my kind of music, but the yard was in a genuinely good mood, and that's worth more than the song list.
Thank You
None of this happens without a few specific people. Jos, for suggesting I go to that first conference in the first place, and for years of working together behind the scenes to keep things running smoothly for attendees even when something inevitably went sideways before doors opened, none of which anyone in the audience ever had to notice. Frank, for the idea itself and for founding the project alongside the rest of Nextcloud's co-founders, a decade later, that initial bet has clearly paid off. And the wider community that's formed around the project since, most of whom I now genuinely know by name rather than by GitHub handle.
Ten years in, still showing up
A ten-year anniversary is a natural point to ask whether something still has momentum, or whether it's coasting on its early reputation. Based on what I saw this year, more attendees than ever, new faces on the company's payroll, a fellow student ready to start contributing, and old friends still turning up in the same hallways, Nextcloud isn't coasting. I don't know what the community will look like at year twenty. I do know I intend to be there to find out, in whatever way is useful that year.
If there's one thing I'd want a reader to take from ten years of doing this without ever opening a code editor, it's that the entry point you're looking for into an open source project probably already exists, even if it isn't obvious from the outside. Every project this size needs its documentation kept current, its interface translated into languages the core team doesn't speak natively, and its story told to people who've never heard of it. None of that requires permission from anyone, and none of it requires you to already be technical. It just requires showing up consistently enough, for long enough, that people start recognizing your name in the room, and then, at some point, realizing you're not a visitor anymore. You're part of how the thing keeps running.
0 Σχόλια