Personal cloud servers like Nextcloud, ownCloud, SeaFile and CERNBox have for several years now supported the Open Cloud Mesh protocol for inviting collaborators to a document or folder.

Open Cloud Mesh is an authorisation flow, rather than a data access protocol. In this sense it's similar to the role OAuth plays for establishing API access.

Open Cloud Mesh can be used to establish collaboration, after which the actual read/write traffic would for instance be handled via server-to-server WebDAV connections.

This means that Open Cloud Mesh can be used in combination with many other protocols, in many different scenarios, depending on document type and mode of collaboration. The protocol is agnostic about whether the collaboration that is being established concerns for instance a text file or a real-time video conference.

We recently published this protocol as an Internet Draft, we run automated tests between implementers and we recently held a technical workshop about the protocol, where implementers came together to compare notes and discuss possible features to add.

This talk will give an overview of how Open Cloud Mesh works and hopefully we can get into a discussion of how Open Cloud Mesh can be useful to others.