Session: Responsible Clouds
https://conference.publicspaces.net/en/session/responsible-cloudsNaam/name Notulist: Lex LakeDatum/date: 28-06-2023 12:45Sprekersnamen/speaker names:
Shownotes
(mentioned links, books, podcasts, literature, etc.)Live notes (500-750 words)
Please use full sentences and write in the spoken language of the session / Graag volledige zinnen gebruiken en de taal aanhouden van de sessieWhat is a responsible cloud business? (Tom)Kai is from The Good Cloud. People were sharing data and files through parnters/vendors not in line woth public values. We have now stay at home das uploading their kids' photos.
And want to give smaller businesses oppurtunity. Mainly in education in government.
Tin: GreenHost, Dutch based hosting company. Socially responsible. We also do providing servcies and direct support activists, responsible cloud for us is a term that defines the idea that everybody should have acces to clouds with respect to us and planet. How do we best support people to access it and bring it to the people. Managed Services and absent software, video chats etc.
There's an alginment with value driven people. The sevrices themselves are getitng so much better everyday. It is now our turn to be ready to absorb the interest or we might risk coopting with corporate powers.
Kai: we have misison based company (to Tin), for Kai it is poverty itself, people in NL are struggeling with income. Children in highschool: if laptop is compulsory there wil be extra digital poverty.
If you don't have money to pay for a paid account, you go to a free Google account. In order to reach our mission and goals we need people to invest.
Tom: who is your target audience? Kai: people who use the free thing, who want to make the next step to paid services. Companies.
Kai there's a challenge to reach people who don't know that there is something better. And help them reach their partners and end users. As a infrastructure service provider we discuss these issues not in a way that they are doing things wrong. It's a choice, but it is made on the information (not all the information?) and provide them with the information so they make, perhaps, other choices.
Tin: I like working with people who loosely assciate with us and are fine.
We actively dont work with big companies like Shell. High purchase power, that is the group that foot the bills. The group we focus on most on journalists actviist, advocay, that need these products but cant access it because of moeny or tehcnologists. revenue is made from the big companies.
Question: You are not looking to work with a company like shell, Surely the scale of change that would come. The revenue would be massive. Tin: Two reasons: every time i see someone from human rights sphere go to facebook as their ethicisit change form the inside, it doesn't work.
The bogger the client the bigger the investment we have to make for that client. And less time for smaller clients.
And we want to drive a change.
Kai: we work with government parties, not all of them are the parties I voted for, especially from USA are banned from social media, and they are lookign for somehwere to be. Also DDoS attacks are when they are on our hostings. From a political point of view i will accept everyone, we have our ehtical values on or site and you need to comply to those. You want to invest reserouces to reach maximum impact.
It is nice to talk to government people directly.
Tom: how are you effective in educating people when you are not an educating company? How do oyu deal with your limited capacity? Kai: a lot of money is made in consultancy. Example things are being uploaded and arhcived from war zones for example, we are making an impact in hosting those. They need their videos to be taken in account, but we can only give 40 hrs of consultancy. with hosting we can give more in a strategic way.
Tom: PS Conference: talking about diigtal commons, you might want to be part of a commons, and Kai's comany's response is making a responsible infrastructure?
Tin: we are both in the business of giving services, what do we mean with ownership. Super important space, a coalition style manifesto thing to protect the space. Tom: you need to be vocal about your space.
Tom: your expertise is non moral digital infrastructure. What is the relationship with your clients where you utalise it and actively engage with these people? Clients customers partners.Tin: Value alignment is a strong beacon. People already working with simialr products are easy. the other side to get people gorups that wnat to make the change, I don't know what I don't know. And then there are groups who don't know anything about responsible clouds. They are a couple of years in the future, we have to be an impulse buy, so we are not there yet. Changes have been accelerating. The way we reach them not through marketing but through conferences and such. We try to present what we have hoenstly and openly. It's as simple as Ikea, some assembly required but youll be happy with the result. We are not scaremongering, we say: here are other options.
Question: you are a competitor of Google. do you think to what extent does it actually do to people who expect Search or ChatGP? As a cloud service you don't offer those kind of things, I can go to GreenHost.net :-) and get a domain. What is your capapbility to reclaim other services?Tin: we need to be better than MS and Google, we are mostly talking about day to day kind of jobs, office, suite and such. Day to day collaboration and work. In that perspective it is complicated, first you need to know the needs and then cover the most of those neds. Stacks mi (??) file editing video chat and a lot more. two problems: we will never have the resources Google has. That does not represent of what people do on a daily basis, the move to a responsible cloud is never expclusive. Am I okay and moving over partially into this sphere and it will be covered really well? Google Docs as an example: our Collaborative editing, nog way near Google Docs. The question is not how do I make you happy without that, why not have a resp. clouds for archiving and se Google Docs for other stuff. We are intermediatories, we need to find out how to bridge services while also maintaining the fact that improvements on the service are out of our hands.
Kai: What we do is look at your envrinment, your users are using Outlook, so how can we upgrade to Zimba, Compana, and make your server to Zimba but still use the outlook client. Same with Next Cloud Files. We made end-to-end, got some funds and paid fifty percent. Step by step all those tools will be adopted, otherwise we will lose people and we help them to take those steps.
We need to think about what are we teaching our children, think of the other options.
Tom: you need to think about unburdening the client. There is a certain requirement that the client engage with the technology. Tin: What goolge and other companies do is let me unburden you. It is a partnership, this responsible cloud business. It's the cool part, we have a conversation, the software isn't done to you, it is built for you. Some people don't want to think about it though. In scale we need to achieve the fundamental ease of unburdening people.
Question: if you look at Municipalty of Amsterdam they looked at What is a good strategy to make an exit with Microsoft, on a certain architecture.
Kai: mostly there is a public values officer available, but new popele working there they saw they dind't use tools that match the public values. In Nijmegen the government said open source, they came to Next Cloud, they had a result after some reseacrh and it was a bridge too far. When I make this long shot and choose a service that no-one would ever choose, and it breaks, I was stupid enough to make this wrong choice my head will be on a block. kai: Now we're doing a three month Proof of Concept department of Inland Affairs, 72 organizations.
Ziekenhuisgroeptwente, have a next cloud next to their organization. They can think about How can we make it safe, and address those public values, and reach our patients. And for municipilalities, their inhabitants.
Question: basically people are aware their data is collected, but they don't care they have 'nothing to hide'. How would you react to that? Tin: this answers to what audience do you want to reach? In last couple of years awarenss have risen. The latter audience we still don't have the tools to get to. It is profoundly unitreresting for them! Better is grow the service and laternative is super interesting, like organic food. You needed a farmer's market, now you can choose betwee mulptiple options. FIancially feasable now.
Question:
riskmanagement: you have a bias to products you use for a long time in comparisent if something is not working probably smaller and then you go back to hat you're used to. Do you think your business will increase the upcoming politcal requirements to make businesses are greener in storing data in the environmental aspect? And get people with you on that and in the slipstream about data?Answer ???
Question: Open source cloud environments, what kind of advice do you have to offer to a break through schooldirector who decides to do something else, take the risk away for people who stand up for public values. Kai: what we see in scool is we made a public task responsible for the public task, that veeyrbody has the same quality and chances in eduaction, we gave that task to google and MS. We think NC is a better alternative, ut we don't want to provide it but it is not our (Next Cloud) task! The government needs to take the responibility and make better choices. Koen additionally: I have one success story: trying to move a way from twitter and FB. The solution is, we have to make the alternatve the cooler more exciting solution. You see this with Mastodon. We asked some of our existing customers if they would run on mastodon servers, and do that for your readers (Groene Amsterdammer).
Kai: it would aslo help if branche organizations and government would make it a little more mandatory.
Question I disagree with let's make it as exciting as the existing platforms. The beauty of all the things you're talking about is that you are providing things that the others can't provide. It's hard to sell but hold on to that. It's a matter of holding on, don't go down the route we need to become the cooler alternative of the others and don't be like the others. Tin: it's about changing the paradigm that we're not like them and we are something interested. we can't break the usubailty brick wall.
Question: You talk about next cloud, back then in Stuttgard he (Frank (from Next Cloud?)) had some success stories about an internet provider in Japan, every one gets a next cloud storage. We celebrate every percentage we go up, it happens in so many spaces the example of mastadon/Twitter. Thank you for giving the project visibility. 