Ow3ned or Owned?

A week or so ago Lori Emerson shared the above Tweet by Kyle McDonald who was sharing a slide from a talk by Julian Oliver. I have been using it as talking point for Reclaim Cloud since. One of the beautiful things about this Tweet is it highlights the fact there’s a whole new generation of elegant, powerful, and open source applications that you can run as an alternative to all those “free” sites that only cost your freedom 🙂 I think folks might start realizing free is not free and that to truly control your data you have to spend some time, money, and professional energy to do so. Not everyone will, but for those that do it’s a real alternative that helps organizations protect their members from re-living the whole “do no evil” with our data, lord tech conglomerate.

While thinking through how we are going to roll-out Reclaim Cloud, Tim and I started brainstorming clusters of applications that folks might use, such as Etherpad, Jitsi Meet, and Discourse for your courses; or ShinyApps, R-Studio, JupyterHub, Jekyl, and Voyant Tools for Digital Humanists; or for an organization/department NextCloud, Mattermost, Ghost, and MailTrain, etc. You get the idea, frame groups of applications for targeted uses that begin to frame an open-source ecosystem that we can create not only one-click installers for in Reclaim Cloud, as well as focused professional development and expertise to support those tools. Which is why this graphic was so useful, it does a one-to-one comparison and it helps us focus what we can and should offer folks as a real alternative to the less than ideal status quo.

Then yesterday I had a call with the awesome folks at Michigan State University to show them Reclaim Cloud, and Kristen Mapes mentioned that she was interested in an open source alternative to her current teaching suite of Google Docs, Slack, and Zoom, to which the graphic brilliant maps as Mattermost, Etherpad, and Jitsi Meet—a perfect fit and we already have one-click installer for all of them 🙂

Interesting that they use the terminology ownership given that has caused some concern in the past with “owning” your domain. But in this case ownership is premised around the idea of self-hosting your applications in order to have increased security and control over your personal, organizational, or professional presence. It makes damn good sense to me, but I am biased 🙂

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