Sat 12 December 2015 by Christoph Witzany
This is the story of a conference and how it helped with the crystallization of an idea.
Before The Conference
When I read about the conference on the redecentralize mailing list, I knew CloudFleet must be represented there. The case for redecentralization was at the core of CloudFleet even before the project had taken the form name and scope it has now.
Being buried deep in engineering problems to create a safe and secure mail server that is ready for everyone, we'd neglected most contact to the outside in the last months. Now with a usable product in sight, it was time to get out of the building and recalibrate with the needs of the people we build CloudFleet for. We were confident the redecentralize conference - organized by the incredible Irina Bolychevsky - would bring together people who understand what we want to achieve. I was not disappointed.
Arriving at the conference I had three goals. The first was to present CloudFleet to a crowd of decentralization enthusiasts and collect feedback about whether we are moving in the right direction. The second was to connect with other projects we could use in our quest to create a private data center. The third one was to introduce and explore the concept of Data Autonomy, something we deem necessary for decentralization and want to enable with CloudFleet.
Feedback
I was pretty sure that the concept of a self-hosted mail server that grows into a private data center would resonate with the people at the conference. What I was a bit insecure about was if people would be ready to pay money for it.
After all, most participants of the conference had already installed tools that allowed them to get rid of one or the other cloud service and many would not have a hard time installing a mail server by themselves.
But my expectations were exceeded by far. I heard from a number of people that they would be ready to buy it on the spot and I could have even sold some devices there; too bad our engineering wasn't there yet.
CloudFleet was mentioned in the finishing panel discussion as an example of how redecentralization could find its way into the minds and hearts of people.
Now, two months later and in the middle of the feverish effort to prepare our crowdfunding campaign, this makes me hope we will be able to start.
Connections
I connected with many really interesting people at the conference, so I'll just talk about the ones with the most direct relevance for CloudFleet.
Tristan from CozyCloud – who have similar goals with a slightly different approach – was there. I managed to talk to the guys from Matrix, an open protocol for real time communication that works over https and has federation baked in and we had a very interesting discussion on how to simplify the deployment of decentralized services.
Data Autonomy
On a hot summer day, while contemplating how to frame the problem we want to solve with CloudFleet, the term Data Autonomy formed in my head. The sovereignty of individuals over their data.
The redecentralize conference was the perfect environment to pull this concept down from abstract heights and start talking about what Data Autonomy really means.
We had a small but intense discussion in which we explored different forms of data generation and how data ownership can be defined. And while the ideas where still fluid after this session, it set the seed for the definition of the three powers that are at the core of Data Autonomy:
The Power of Knowledge
Knowledge is the possibility to know what data exists about us. Very often nowadays we are not told what data is collected about us. The Europe vs. Facebook case illustrated this problem very well, but arguably more data is collected by government actors.
The Power of Access
Besides the obvious fact that we do not have access to data we don't know are being collected, cloud providers also can cut off access to our accounts for seemingly arbitrary reasons, leading to a loss of access to data we collected for our own use.
The Power of Control
Control entails the possibility to decide what data about us we want to share with whom. This concerns data that we collect, like photo albums or emails, but also data that is collected about us, like energy use or credit card transactions.