ODSA Tech Committee / Drive Pilot

Feedback closes October 31, 2026

Tester guide

Trying out OpenCloud

About 20 minutes. Six short tasks.

If you cannot work out how to do one of these tasks, give it a couple of minutes and then move on. "I could not find it" is a useful answer.

Do this guide first. If you are also testing CryptPad, work through this one before that one. Task 6 on both guides asks you to compare the two systems, and it only makes sense once you have used this one.

Before you start

  1. Read this warning first: nothing personal or sensitive goes in here, for the whole run of the pilot. No member names, phone numbers, addresses or rosters, and nothing confidential. Anything else can be real.
  2. Keep your own copy of anything you save here. We may have to delete all three platforms at short notice, so nothing should live only in this one.
  3. Sign in at opencloud.odsapilot.com with the username and password sent to you.
  4. Change your password straight away. 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.
  5. Files here live in Spaces rather than in one large folder tree, and the spaces are not on the first screen you land on. Click Spaces in the left-hand menu, open the one called ODSA Pilot, and read Read me first. Everything the six tasks name lives inside that space. If it is not there, or it is empty, stop and tell us: that is our mistake, not yours.
  6. You will also see your own chapter's space. 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 space. If you can, tell us straight away.

The six tasks

1. Upload a file

  1. Open 03 Outreach.
  2. Add any harmless file. A photo or a PDF is fine.

2. Share a link

  1. Find the file you just uploaded.
  2. Create a link to it.
  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?

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. Plain text files open in a different, simpler editor that is not the one we are testing.

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. If you conclude there is no way to comment, say that instead.

5. Find a file

Search two ways.

  1. By name: search for Meeting notes. Two documents have that in their name — one in 01 Committee and one from 16 July 2026 in 04 Archive.
  2. By contents: search for the word Kestrel. It is inside two of these documents and in none of their names.

Tell us: did the first search find both documents, and did the second find anything? If either 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.

One thing you may notice

OpenCloud asks for an email address in a few places. You do not have to give a real one, and please do not. Nothing on this server can send mail. If a field insists, anything of the form orl03@example.invalid is fine.

Mention it in your feedback. The chapter would rather not collect an address for every member if it does not have to.

On your phone, if you want to

The six tasks above are written for a web browser, and you can finish all of them there on a laptop or a phone. This part is optional.

OpenCloud also has apps for Android, iPhone and the desktop, and they work with this pilot server. If you install one, sign in with the same account name and password, and use opencloud.odsapilot.com as the server address.

Tell us if you tried one, and whether it was better or worse than the browser. A lot of us do chapter work on a phone, and a platform that is awkward there is awkward for the people with the least time.

If you get stuck

Try the tasks without help first. A task you could not finish tells us more than one you finished by reading the manual.

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

If you needed it, say which task sent you there.

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".

Questions go to Esteban on Discord, or on Signal if you have it.