You are invited to our upcoming AIP Sustainability Session: 22 May 2025

You are invited to the Sustainability Session taking place next week Thursday, 22 May 2025.

Cheaper, faster and more secure: Why you should localise your tech stack.

In this session, Adam Oxford from Area of Effect and Toby Kurien from Nextcloud Hosting will demonstrate and discuss cost effective local solutions that beat the likes of Google, Microsoft and more for better publishing.

In particular, they will be looking at how the modern approach to software sales is built around expensive monthly licenses for essential applications such as email, word processing, web hosting, project management and more. For example, Google Workspace and Microsoft Office 365 are priced in dollars, making them prohibitively expensive for local publishers, leading many to rely on less secure free or hacked tools. They are increasingly problematic in other ways too, thanks to the direction of US tech policy and the mandatory inclusion of AI tools which read everything.

For office suites and much else, what we need is secure, reliable, cost-effective effective solutions which grant journalists access to best-in-class tools which they control – and local partners rather than complex FAQ lists to help implement and maintain them (ever tried to get through to Google support?).

Adam and Toby will run through examples of these applications, and in particular Nextcloud – a full replacement for Microsoft and Google tools with additional options for editorial workflow management, as well as secure filesharing with colleagues and sources.

Date: 22 May 2025

Time: 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM

Join via Teams: If you are interested, please call or email the office.