In an increasingly digital society, individuals and organizations of any kind have to take many decisions on which tools and services to use to make their life easier, more fun and productive. For those who just want something that works out-of-the-box, mainstream products or cloud services mainly developed by large US-based corporations are the go-to, no-brainer choice. But if we widen our view to take into account long-term aspects and implications of our decisions, difficult-to-answer questions start to pop-up: where is the data going to be stored? Is the provider going to use my data for goals that are not directly related to provide the service that I’m subscribing to? What if I change my mind in the future and want to switch to a different provider? Does the provider comply with the local privacy and security protection legislation?

From laptops to home routers, from servers to smartphone, from operating systems to mobile and web applications, from social networks to chat applications.. while the digital tools and services mentioned above cover an incredibly vast domain, in this talk we will focus on Nextcloud, an open-source collaboration platform that can be deployed anywhere, let the user directly control his data and offers advanced features such as documents management and synchronization on all the devices, chat, videoconferencing , productivity apps and an AI assistant, that can also be deployed locally.

We will not only expose the platform features, but we will also explain the options to get your own Nextcloud instance up and running, assess how a decentralized and interoperable service such as Nextcloud makes the whole ecosystem more resilient, mention the legal aspects related to the GDPR and the more recent Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act and, finally, speak about a large-scale case study in which I was directly involved in an early-phase of the project.