Nextcloud Community Conference 2024 and Matrix Conference 2024

This months has been so densely packed with conferences that I’m lagging behind on reporting on them here. So you get two in one post now, the Nextcloud Community Conference 2024 which followed almost back-to-back on Akademy, and the Matrix conference 2024 last weekend.

Nextcloud

The Nextcloud conference is a week-long event, I’ve however only managed to attend parts of the first two conference days. Still enough for a few interesting conversations.

The most exciting development from a KDE (PIM) point of view would be the progress on CalDav push notifications. While this was still mostly a theoretical concept when we discussed it last year with the DAVx⁵ team, there is now a working prototype consisting of the DAV Push Nextcloud (server) app and the DAVx⁵ Android sync client.

With a working server to test against, getting this implemented for the KDE clients has become a lot more interesting and feasible.

We also discussed Wayland support of the Nextcloud desktop client, and I learned an interesting detail in Björn Lundell’s keynote, the fact that the official EU translations of laws can have (unintentional) semantic differences, as can be observed apparently in the definition of “FOSS” in the new EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA).

Matrix

For the Matrix conference I also only managed to attend half of it, but KDE overall had a slightly bigger presence there, as KDE also is an Associate Member of the Matrix foundation.

My main interest here was advancing the Matrix-based trip synchronization in Itinerary. I described the basic idea here previously, but of course actually implementing this encounters many more challenges. And those are much easier to solve when you have physical access to a bunch of people with extensive experience on that subject.

Most parts for interacting with Matrix directly should be done now, but there’s still a lot of things to be sorted out to make the synchronization robust in all kinds of scenarios. Overall this looks promising though and might get done in time for 24.12.

Beyond Itinerary I also was involved a bit with reviving and improving the Android CD builds of NeoChat. Some of the discussed changes would also benefit other KDE applications on Android.

What’s next

October will be a bit more relaxed regarding events, next I’ll be at the bi-annual OSM Hack Weekend in Karlruhe again.