The NGI POINTER’s first open call closed on the 1st of June, 2020, with 159 applications submitted attracting researchers, developers, Internet activists, SMEs, and start-ups, in the development of a more human-centric Internet — one that supports values of openness, inclusiveness, and protection of privacy. The evaluation period has already begun, and the final results will be available by mid-July.
“We received a massive 159 proposals to renovate the Internet Architecture. This is a fantastic result for the Project and for the Internet. It shows how many people care about maintaining and improving the Internet.“, explains Mirko Presser, Programme Chair and Professor at Aarhus Universitet.
The open call closed with a total of more than 400 applications started, from 30 different countries attracting both individuals and established entities experienced in building, on top of state-of-the-art research, scalable protocols, and tools.
“NGI Pointer is one of the biggest opportunities world wide for Open Source Developers to get visibility, support and funding for their project“, says Mirko Ross, CEO digital worx, one of the partners of NGI POINTER. “With the support of NGI Pointer the selected projects and teams are getting a powerful funding to work on their projects and set focus on developing solutions to boost europe’s next generation internet environment.“, stated Ross.
Selected projects will be invited to join a 12-month support programme and they will receive business and technical assistance. The project has a total of 5.6 million euros of budget and selected individuals or established entities reaching the last one can get from 50.000 € to 200.000 € respectively.
About NGI-Pointer
NGI-POINTER is a project coordinated by Aarhus Universitet, where the open calls are managed by FundingBox with additional partners including digital worx and linknovate, funded by the European Commission under Grant Agreement no 871528.
The project aims to find ambitious “NGI architects” to change the underlying fabric of the internet and the web, by supporting promising bottom-up projects that are able to build, on top of state-of-the-art research, scalable protocols and tools to assist in the practical transition or migration to new or updated technologies, whilst keeping European Values at the core.
The open call of NGI-POINTER will distribute 5.6M€ and targets “NGI architects” who will be supported in developing and providing new marketable solutions. The selected bottom-up projects will join a 12-month Support Programme to accelerate the execution of their projects. Those reaching the end of the programme can get up to 200,000€ equity-free funding. This call will launch on the 1st of April 2020 and will have a first cut-off date on the 1st of June 2020 at 13:00 (CEST). Additional cut-off dates will follow.
