Tech Ministry's first ownCloud event

A week ago we had an ownCloud event in our Hackerspace where Stathis and me presented ownCloud to the people. I wanted to make something different than present a new feature of ownCloud so I decided to make a presentation about how Tech Ministry is using and going to use ownCloud. It was a 15 minutes presentation that was seperated to 5 minutes of me talking and 10 minutes people asking. aparently many people was asking us many things about our decision to make something like that. As we are a new Hackerspace most of the people around were new people. Kudos to Stathis and Tech Ministry's network team for answering half of the questions back. Needless to say about
Here are some photos:

If you are interested you can find more at the G+ event page .
See you at the next one

Into the clouds...

Where is the cloud? How safe is the cloud? Why to use a cloud service?

Those where the first questions I asked when I learned about the cloud a few years ago while I was in a conference. Of all three questions the third was the easiest to answer since I already had a problem with on where to store my presentations while traveling from conference to conference since I already had a lot of experience with 'flash drive accidents' . I was always careful and always had my presentations at least in 3 different storage after completion but even though all the 'safety' measures I was taking the personal stress of thinking that at any given moment things could go wrong.

 I tried my first cloud service that was Dropbox. It was nice for a while but then the other two questions came up and although I was sure about my content I wanted to know where is my content stored and how safe my content was. Two years ago I discovered ownCloud  and it seemed like a good idea that was going to solve all of my problems. I am a plain user and I do not need any 'extreme' stuff from my cloud, although ownCloud has that too. Setting it up was much less trouble than expected and this is another strong point of ownCloud. Literally it takes just a bit longer than it takes creating an account to gmail. Also it was much easier for my wife to learn how to use it after I had a client installed in her laptop. At least easier that teaching her ssh and stuff... Made my family life much easier :D

Last but not least ownCloud is Open Source and if you are reading this blog for a while you know how I feel about it :)

Building a Hackerspace

A lot of good things are going on lately. Last weekend I was in Nuremberg for the openSUSE Board f2f meeting which when more than fine. I am preparing for oSC15 and on the openSUSE Camp things are better than usual.

We spent a few months talking about making a Hackerspace in Thessaloniki and almost a couple of months some people decided to stop talking and start acting. So we made Tech Ministry , a 180 square meters place in the center of Thessaloniki where everybody can find a home for their projects. Of course we are still building it, literally a hackerspace is never over, but we still need a few things to make it functional. We plan to have it fully functional but the end of next week, but I know really well that everybody has a plan until they get hit, LoL.
If you have some money left in your paypal and you want to help you can do it by donating to our Hackerspace here. We could also use any kind of equipment that you don't need so all you have to do is contact me here by sending a comment or by sending me an email. If you are an FOSS Project Tech Ministry is always happy to support you by promoting your project in our members, so just send us all the information you think we will need for that. 

Running again for the openSUSE Board

Last year I was elected from the community to be one of the members of the openSUSE Board. It was an amazing experience and I learned more things that I could imagine. What I learned from this experience is that being an openSUSE Board member requires people that are deeply involved to the project.

This year I am running again for board and I would like your vote.

History

Over the years I served the openSUSE project with many ways. I was for some years in charge for the Ambassador program, I was a member for Travel Support Program and I am a member of the Marketing Team. Last but not least I was one of the creators of the Greek community where in 2013 organized the openSUSE Conference in Thessaloniki Greece.

My vision

What I believe I could change as a member of the board would be mostly to strengthen the role of the community in order to continue bringing contributors to the Project. My opinion is that the openSUSE Project can use some more visibility in events around the globe, events that will continue bringing more people and more contributors to the openSUSE Project. Our Project is evolving and I feel that more people should know about it, evolve and be a part of those changes. 

SUSE is providing the openSUSE Project some of the best people around FOSS. Many community people see the SUSE people that work for the openSUSE Project not as part of the community but as something different, the truth is(and it should be heard) that those guys are not 9-5 employees but a genuine part of the broader openSUSE community that are very open to any help. So my vision for this year is to do what is needed to eliminate this perception. I believe that by doing that will help the Project evolve even more and faster.