ODSA Tech Committee / Drive Pilot

Feedback closes September 13, 2026

Tester guide

Trying out Nextcloud

About 20 minutes. Six short tasks.

Thanks for helping. The chapter is looking at three ways to replace Google Drive, and you are trying one of them.

You are not being tested. The software is. If something is confusing, that is the most useful thing you can tell us. If you cannot work out how to do one of these tasks, give it two minutes and then say so. "I could not find it" is a real answer and we want it.

Before you start

  1. Read this warning first: do not put anything real in here. No member names, no phone numbers, no addresses, no actual chapter business. Everything in this system is invented, and the whole server is deleted at the end of the pilot along with anything you save in it.
  2. Sign in at nextcloud.odsapilot.com with the username and password sent to you.
  3. Change your password straight away, under Settings, then Security. There is no email on this system. If you forget your password, an admin has to set you a new one, and nothing will be emailed to you.
  4. Open the folder called ODSA Pilot and read Read me first.
  5. You will also see your own chapter's folder. That one belongs to your chapter, and the tasks below do not use it. You should not be able to see any other chapter's folder. If you can, tell us straight away.

The six tasks

1. Upload a file

  1. Open 03 Outreach.
  2. Drag any harmless file into the window, or use the + button. A photo or a PDF is fine.

2. Share a link

  1. Find the file you just uploaded.
  2. Use the share icon next to it to create a link.
  3. Send the link to whoever asked you to do this.

Tell us: could you tell, from what was on screen, who would be able to open that link? That question matters more than whether the link worked.

3. Co-edit a document

  1. Open 01 Committee, then Committee meeting notes.odt.
  2. Ask one other person to open the same document at the same time.
  3. Both type into it.

Use that document, or another ending in .odt, .docx, .ods or .xlsx. Files ending in .txt or .md open in a different, simpler editor that is not the one we are testing. Trying this with a text file will work beautifully and tell us nothing.

Tell us: did you see the other person's cursor and their words as they typed, without reloading the page?

4. Comment on a document

  1. Open 01 Committee, then Agenda 2026-08-20.odt.
  2. Leave a comment on it. A comment is a remark about the document, rather than a change to it.

Tell us: how long it took to find where comments live, and whether the other person noticed you had left one.

5. Find a file

Search two ways. The second one is the interesting one.

  1. Search by name for the meeting notes from July.
  2. Search for the word Kestrel, which is inside two of these documents and nowhere else.

Tell us: did the second search find anything? If it found nothing, that is not your mistake, and it is exactly what we are trying to learn.

6. The two-system question

  1. Open 01 Committee, then Where the sensitive doc lives.
  2. Follow the link inside it. The document it points to is held on a different system, CryptPad, which the people running this server cannot read.
  3. Read that document.

Tell us: did having the sensitive document somewhere else feel sensible, or did it feel like being made to do the same job twice?

This mirrors something the chapter already does. Ordinary business happens in the open, and anything sensitive happens on Signal instead. We want to know whether that works for documents, or whether people would quietly stop bothering.

If you get stuck

Try the tasks without help first. Whether an ordinary member can do them unaided is the single thing this pilot is measuring, so a task you could not finish is worth more to us than a task you finished by reading the manual.

Once you have had a go, the people who make Nextcloud publish their own instructions:

If you needed it, say which task sent you there. That is a result about the software, not about you.

What to send back

Fill in the feedback form once for this platform, ideally straight after your session while it is fresh. Cover:

Write down anything that made you say "why would it do that". Those are the things that decide whether a chapter can actually keep a system running, and they never appear in a feature comparison.

Questions go to the Tech Committee Co-Chairs, currently Esteban and Sebastian, on Discord or Slack.