OwnCloud Rationale
Using ownCloud - Rationale for COST Action CA19130
The proposal on behalf of the Technical Coordinator is to use ownCloud mainly for two purposes:
- (A) Collecting documents to be processed by the Dissemination team.
- (B) Storing each and every document created by the Action.
The core idea is based on the fact that an EU project should have a self-hosted and self-serviced secure platform within the European Union and not to rely (solely) on commercial US products. However, it is clear that at the moment these tools can and should not be removed from the day-to-day business as the overhead to learn and adapt to new systems.
While other systems can be conveniently used for task (A) the task (B) should be definitely used, however please note the following paragraph.
IMPORTANT: This means that it is not recommended to change your preferred task on how to accomplish things, i.e. you should continue to use Google Drive, Microsoft Office 365, Apple Pages and Keynote or whatever software you prefer. However, each document should be added to the chronology directory of the ownCloud, i.e. the directory sub-structure is year (2020, 2021, ...) and monthly (202009, 202010). The documents itself should always start with the date (YYYYMMDD) followed by a rather meaningful filename. The documents should be stored in a reasonable format, i.e. PDF or DOCX, PPTX, XLSX as these formats can be processed using open-source tools as well. If there is a further explanation of the content necessary, a .txt file with the same base file name as the document itself should be created specifying the relevant additional information about the document.
The process above certainly requires an extra amount of work, i.e. about 1-2 minutes per new document. Previous documents can be processed quicker as only the filename has to be adapted in many cases.
The advantage of having each and every document available at one central place hosted by the project itself and backed up to all project partners who want to contribute a backup space is an advantage which will we proud of at latest at the end of the project.