About
The Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative continues to evolve, building on past successes while addressing new challenges in Europe’s digital landscape. As emerging technologies reshape the way we interact online, NGI remains committed to ensuring that the Internet of the future is open, inclusive, trustworthy, and sustainable.
The NGI Forum 2025 will focus on the building of an Open Internet Stack as conducive to European digital sovereignty and users’ empowerment. It will serve as a key platform to bring together innovators, policymakers, researchers, and industry leaders. The Forum will provide an opportunity to reflect on major developments in digital sovereignty, open internet infrastructure, and digital commons, while fostering collaboration between diverse stakeholders shaping Europe’s digital future.
The NGI Forum 2025 is the flagship event of the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative. It brings together some of Europe’s top Internet innovators at work to build an Internet of Trust, empowering end-users with more choice and control over their data and digital identity.
Aims & Objectives
The NGI Forum 2025 aims to:
- Promote the NGI vision and its latest advancements
- Engage key stakeholders in meaningful discussions on internet governance, digital innovation, and policy development
- Facilitate networking and collaboration among the NGI community, industry leaders, and policymakers
- Provide a space for knowledge-sharing on open-source development, trust technologies, and decentralized digital ecosystems
By bringing together experts and innovators, the Forum seeks to strengthen Europe’s position as a leader in digital innovation, ensuring that new technologies align with European values of openness, trust, and security.
What to Expect
Participants can look forward to:
- Workshops on Digital Commons and Open Web Search
- Collaborative discussions on the Open Internet Stack
- Insights from top experts in digital policy and innovation
- Opportunities for networking and exchange
Who Should Attend?
The NGI Forum 2025 welcomes a diverse range of stakeholders, including:
- EU and national policymakers shaping Europe’s digital framework
- Open-source developers and innovators working on privacy, security, and trust technologies
- Researchers and academics exploring digital commons and decentralized infrastructures
- Industry leaders and entrepreneurs driving digital innovation
- Media and civil society organizations advocating for digital rights and governance
Key Details
- Location: Brussels
- Venue: Albert Borschette Congress Center, Rue Froissart 36, 1040 Etterbeek, Belgium
- Dates: 19-20 June 2025
- Format: In-person event with selected sessions available via live-stream
- Language: English (no live interpretation foreseen)
Agenda
19 & 20 June
Day 1 – Thursday |
Activity |
|---|---|
| 8:30 – 9:30 | Registration and networking |
| 9:30 – 9:45 | Welcome remarks |
| 9:45 – 10:45 |
Digital Commons tools for building Digital Sovereignty Introduction and Moderation: Dr Monique Calisti (Martel Innovate)
Wrap-up conclusion: Robbert Van Kranenburg (Martel Innovate) |
| 10:45 – 11:00 | Coffee Break |
| 11:00 – 12:00 | NGI Impact Stories |
| 12:00– 13:00 |
Towards a strategic agenda for (funding) the Digital Commons Introduction and Moderation: Paul Keller (Open Future Foundation)
Wrap-up conclusion: Robbert Van Kranenburg (Martel Innovate) |
| 13:00 – 14:00 | Lunch and networking |
| 14:00 – 14:10 |
Afternoon introduction Master of Ceremony: Jennifer Baker |
| 14:10 – 14:25 | Keynote from European Commission |
| 14:25 – 14:40 | Keynote speech: Openness and sovereignty |
| 14:40 – 15:40 |
Forging European Digital Sovereignty through an Open Internet Stack Panel:
|
| 15:40 – 16:10 | Coffee and networking break |
| 16:10 – 17:10 |
Open Infrastructure, Sovereign Future: Building Europe’s Digital capacity Panel:
|
| 17:10 – 18:10 |
Building an open and interoperable Web 4.0 enabling Virtual Worlds Panel:
|
| 18:10 – 18:20 |
Conclusions of Day 1 Speaker: Thibaut Kleiner (European Commission) |
| 18:20 – 20:00 | Networking cocktail |
Day 2 – Friday |
Activity |
|---|---|
| 08:30-9:00 | Coffee and networking |
| 9:00 – 9:15 |
Introduction Speaker: Stefan Voigt (OSF)
|
| 9:15 – 9:45 |
Keynote “The first European Open Web Index – Current State and Perspective”, followed by Q&A Speaker: Michael Granitzer (University of Passau)
|
| 9:45 – 10:30 |
Policy statements “Why Europe needs to build an Open Web Index and Web Data Infrastructure for Search, Analytics and AI”, followed by discussion Speakers:
|
| 10:30 – 11:15 |
Applications of an Open Web Index and Web Data Infrastructure, followed by panel discussion Moderator: Sara Garavelli (CSC)
|
| 11:15 – 11:45 | Coffee break |
| 11:45 – 12:30 |
Panel discussion “Web Sovereignty – towards a sovereign web tech stack for Europe” Moderator: Stefan Voigt (OSF)
|
| 12:30-13:00 |
Closing session and statement Speakers:
|
| 13:00 – 14:00 | Lunch and networking |
| 14:00-16:30 | Parallel Sessions: |
|
Co-creating the building blocks of the NGI with the end-user at the centre Moderator: Andres Del Alamo
|
Digital Freedom meets Digital Payments Speaker: Özgür Kesim |
Software and GenAI Supply Chain Security and CRA compliance with NGI Speaker: Philippe Ombredanne |
|
Co-creating the building blocks of the NGI with the end-user at the centre Moderator: Andres Del Alamo
|
|
|
Digital Freedom meets Digital Payments Speaker: Özgür Kesim |
|
|
Software and GenAI Supply Chain Security and CRA compliance with NGI Speaker: Philippe Ombredanne |
Speakers
Thibaut Kleiner
DG CNECT, European Commission
Thibaut Kleiner
Director @ DG CNECT, European Commission
Thibaut Kleiner is the Director for Future Networks in DG Connect. He has worked since 2001 at the European Commission. The first ten years of his career in the Commission were spent in the area of competition policy (merger, antitrust and State aid). In September 2011, he moved to the digital policy area, as advisor of Vice-President Neelie Kroes, in charge of the Digital Agenda, and supervised Internet policies at large (Internet Governance, cybersecurity, cloud, data). From January 2014 to June 2016, he was head of unit in charge of network technologies (5G and Internet of Things) in DG Connect. From June 2016 to December 2019 he was the deputy head of cabinet of Commissioner Oettinger, in charge of Budget and Human Resources and he then came back to DG Connect to head the unit in charge of Research Strategy and Coordination and was subsequently Director for Policy, Strategy and Outreach from December 2020 until March 2025. An economist by training Thibaut holds a Master from HEC Paris and a PhD from the London School of Economics.
Lina Gálvez
European Parliament
Lina Gálvez
MEP @ European Parliament
Lina Gálvez Muñoz is a Member of the European Parliament (EP) for Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D) group, since July 2019. In the EP, she is Chair of the Women’s Rights and Gender Equality Committee, member of the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy and Vice-chair of the Panel for the Future of Science and Technology (STOA). She also sits on the Committee on International Trade (INTA) as substitute member. She is a member of the Delegations for Relations with the United States and the Korean Peninsula, Vice-Chair of the Sky and Space Intergroup, and serves as an Ambassador of Women Political Leaders for the European Parliament. She is Vice-President of The Foundation for European Progressive Studies (FEPS), where she is Chair of FEPS Scientific Council since June 2023.
Lina Gálvez Muñoz PhD, European University Institute (Florence) is Economic History and Institutions Full Professor at the Economics Department at Pablo Olavide University (Seville).
She has also been professor at the Universities of Reading (Reading), Carlos III (Madrid), and as a visiting professor at Centre for time use research at Oxford University (Oxford). She has more than hundred scientific publications and she has been Vice-Rector of her university from 2007 to 2012 and served from 2018 to 2019 as the Regional Minister of Knowledge, Research, and University in the Government of Andalusia, led by the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE).
Social scientist and feminist, her work focuses on the understanding and measuring of gender economic inequalities in the past and in the present, and the centrality of women’s work paid and unpaid to understand development paths, state models, and technological choices over time.
Alexandra Geese
European Parliament
Alexandra Geese
MEP @ European Parliament
Alexandra Geese has been a Member of the European Parliament since 2019, representing the Greens/EFA group as a leading digital policy expert. Her work focuses on strengthening democracy in the digital age, promoting sustainable digitalisation, and advancing gender equality. A key negotiator of the Digital Services Act, she is a prominent voice on platform regulation and technological sovereignty. Alexandra serves as the Greens/EFA Coordinator on the Special Committee on the European Democracy Shield and is an active member of the Committees on Industry, Research and Energy; Women’s Rights and Gender Equality; and the Delegation for relations with the United States. She is also a substitute member of the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection. Alexandra holds a Master’s degree in Social Sciences with a focus on migration studies from Ca’ Foscari University in Venice and a Master of Arts in Conference Interpreting from the Fachhochschule Köln.
Stéphanie Schaer
DINUM
Stéphanie Schaer
Directrice @ DINUM
Stéphanie Schaer, senior civil servant, is a General Mining Engineer (“Ingénieur général des Mines” in French), appointed as the French interministerial director of digital affairs (DINUM) in September 2022. A former student of the École Polytechnique (1997), she is also a graduate of the École nationale supérieure des télécommunications/Télécom Paris.
Her professional career took her to the central directorate for information systems security (DCSSI in French, now ANSSI – Agence nationale de la sécurité des systèmes d’information) from 2002 to 2006, then at the Ministry of the Economy, Industry and Employment, where she was in charge of the embedded electronics and then head of the software industry office of the General Directorate for Competitiveness, Industry and Services in 2008. She then became deputy regional director for compagnies, competition, consumption, labor and employment (DIRECCTE in French) for Bourgogne (Bourgogne is a former French administrative region made up of four departments), then for Bourgogne-Franche-Comté (Bourgogne-Franche-Comté is an administrative region in the north-eastern quarter of France). At the same time, in 2015, she launched the State Startup “Signaux Faibles”, which enables early detection of companies in difficulty, to better support them, based on data held by administrations. This service, now deployed nationwide, has benefited from DINUM’s support programs: entrepreneurs of general interest (EIG) and the State Startup incubation program, Beta.gouv.
In 2019, Stephanie Schaer became deputy director of Elisabeth Borne’s office, first at the Ministry of Ecological Transition and Solidarity and then at the Ministry of Labor, where she was subsequently appointed chieff of staff. When Elisabeth Borne was appointed Prime Minister at Matignon in May 2022, Stephanie Schaer became her advisor. On September 26, 2022, she was named Head of the interministerial digital directorate (DINUM in French).
Denis "Jaromil" Roio
Dyne.org Foundation
Denis "Jaromil" Roio
Director @ Dyne.org foundation
Well-known open-source developer and ethical hacker, Denis is a doctor in philosophy and TEDx speaker, and works as an applied cryptographer and cyber-security expert. Better known as “Jaromil”, he is the founder and director of the Dyne.org foundation and co-founder of the Forkbomb Company, co-chair of the W3C security interest group (SING), and co-founder of the Italian association of cryptographers De Componendis Cifris. Jaromil published the first ever live operating system to boot on a game console “Dynebolic” as 100% free software and is listed among the first contributors to Bitcoin core. He received the Vilém Flusser Award at Transmediale and later became an early promoter of the Vatican’s initiative on Algorethics. He acted as a security officer and technical coordinator for several NGI projects.
Isabelle ZABLIT-SCHMITZ
International Expert in Digital Health
Isabelle ZABLIT-SCHMITZ
international expert in Digital Health
Isabelle ZABLIT-SCHMITZ is a seasoned international expert in Digital Health.
She recently served as Deputy General Director of Numeum (French National Trade Organization for digital) and prior to that as Europe & International Director for Digital Health for the French Ministry of Health during 4 years. In that position, she managed EU, WHO, OECD and bilateral partnerships; she was the representative in the eHealth Network co-chaired by France and EU Commission. Her prior career was entirely in the private sector, from industry to digital health, in local and international companies and started 2 companies on her own.
She has been teaching at Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne University and in several other universities, internationally and serves as a board member in institutions. She has served as Executive Committee and Board Member of the French digital federation (Numeum) for 6 years and 8 years at the Board of IHEST (Institute of Advanced Studies in Science and Technology). She has been a Board Member of DIGITALEUROPE and of several start ups and a social care institution.
Sean Bohan
OpenWallet Foundation
Sean Bohan
OpenWallet Foundation
A 20+ year career in technology, Sean has built content management systems for ABC, global digital strategies for General Motors, product design for innovative startups and advised investors on where technology is going. The last dozen years have been spent as an entrepreneur and executive member of start-up teams and working on the future of both web sustainability (Mozilla) and decentralized identity (Linux Foundation). As a Community Architect at the OpenWallet Foundation he works with open source developers, enterprises and users in bringing these technologies to the world.
Nina Müller
Nextcloud
Nina Müller
Business Project Manager @ NextCloud
Nina holds a degree in English and sociology and has worked in various roles and industries such as SaaS, weather or music. A non-code contributor to open source, Nina has led tech conferences like Berlin Buzzwords for many years and is passionate about elevating privacy standards. At Nextcloud, she is supporting that mission to give people back control over their data and help strengthen digital sovereignty.
Niko Bonnieure
NextGraph
Niko Bonnieure
Author of NextGraph.org
Niko Bonnieure is a software engineer specialized in encryption, local-first and linked data technologies. After working in big data startups for several years, and following the Snowden revelations in 2013, he decided to quit those jobs and dedicate his time to building a decentralized platform for secure and private apps based on graph databases. In the last years, he has been building NextGraph.org, an ecosystem of malleable apps and a framework for developers who want to create decentralized, secure and interoperable apps. Niko is a strong advocate for Digital Sovereignty in Europe, and for Free and Open Source Software.
Stuart Mackintosh
Open Digital Consulting Co
Stuart Mackintosh
Business & digital technology consultant @ Open Digital Consulting Co
Stuart Mackintosh is a recognised thought leader in open source and digital innovation, with extensive experience delivering high-impact, high-value projects across Europe, UK and beyond. He is the founder of the Mackintosh Group, comprising of Open Digital Consulting, Cloudient, and XI Software—where he leads with a values-driven approach grounded in openness, integrity, and creativity.
Deeply immersed in the European Union’s digital ecosystem and open source communities, Stuart contributes to shaping open source and standards policy across UK and EU. His work sits at the intersection of technology, policy, and entrepreneurship, supporting the development of sovereign, human-centric digital infrastructure.
Stuart is committed to creating meaningful impact through systems design, mentoring future innovators and leaders, and supporting teams in turning complex visions into clear, effective solutions. He draws inspiration from principles such as the Paradoxical Commandments, focusing on what’s right and meaningful, even when it’s difficult. A sought-after advisor and leader, Stuart regularly engages with public institutions, companies, and civil society on the role of open technology in advancing the public good.
Sara Garavelli
CSC – IT Center for Science
Sara Garavelli
Strategic European Engagement & Coordination Development Manager @ CSC – IT Center for Science
Sara Garavelli, Strategic European Engagement and Coordination Development Manager, CSC-IT Center for Science
Sara works at CSC-IT Center for Science in the International Collaboration and Partnerships Unit where she leads the team responsible for CSC’s strategic engagement in European initiatives related to research and education. Examples of such initiatives include EOSC, European Common Data Spaces, AI Factories, Destination Earth, GÉANT and EuroHPC. Sara also serves as Director of the EOSC Association from 2022 and she is a member of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) Council from 2024.
Stefan Voigt
Open Search Foundation, DLR
Stefan Voigt
Chairman & CEO of the Open Search Foundation e.V. and Coordinator of the OpenSearch@DLR project
Dr. Stefan Voigt has been actively working since 2017 on networking research and data centres as well as other stakeholders from industry, politics and civil society in order to jointly design a distributed and open web search infrastructure for Europe. In 2018, he founded the Open Search Foundation e.V. together with other experts and supporters and has been its Chairman and Managing Director ever since. Among other tasks, he coordinates the contributions to various research and development projects. Since 2000, he has been a research associate at the Earth Observation Center of the German Aerospace Center (DLR), where he has coordinated numerous national, European and international research projects and collaborations. He currently heads the OpenSearch@DLR project for unbiased searching and retrieval of scientific information on the web. Dr. Stefan Voigt studied geography, physics, remote sensing and urban planning at LMU and TUM in Munich. He received his PhD in geosciences from the University of Bern in 2000.
Michael Granitzer
University Passau
Michael Granitzer
Professor for Data Science @ University Passau
Prof. Dr. Michael Granitzer holds the Chair of Data Science at University of Passau since 2017 and was full professor for Media Computer Science at the University of Passau since 2012. His research interest is on applied machine learning, web information retrieval and natural language processing. He published over 300 mostly peer-reviewed publications including journal publications, book chapters and books in the above-mentioned fields. Previously, he was Scientific Director of the applied research centern “Know-Center” in Graz and assistant professor at the Knowledge Technology Institute of Graz University of Technology . He managed several nationally funded and European research projects on topics like federated search and recommender systems, linked open data, and information retrieval. Besides his research, he actively supports young innovators and startups in startup programs at the University of Passau. Currently, he is the coordinator of the Horizon Europe project “OpenWebSearch.eu”.
Emmanuel Cartier
EC-JRC
Emmanuel Cartier
EC-JRC
Emmanuel Cartier is currently a Research Project Officer at the European Commission, within the Joint Research Centre’s Text and Data Mining unit (T5). His work focuses on Natural Language Processing and includes contributions to text mining modules (named entities, events, weak signals, sentiment and emotion, etc.) plugged in the European Media Monitor (EMM). Prior to this, he was an assistant professor in Computational Linguistics in Paris at Université Sorbonne Paris Nord. His academic research centered on named entity recognition and neologism tracking, on neologism tracking, leading to the development of the Neoveille web platform for automatic detection and analysis of new words. His broader research interests include text mining and information extraction.
Per Öster
CSC – IT Center for Science
Per Öster
Director Advanced Computing Facility @ CSC – IT Center for Science
Per Öster is Director of CSC Advanced Computing Facility which hosts, operates, support, and develops the Finnish national computing infrastructure and the EuroHPC supercomputer LUMI. Öster represents CSC in a several international initiatives and organisations: EOSC Association; the European Collaborative Data Infrastructure EUDAT; FENIX RI of federated data repositories and supercomputing systems; the board of ELIXIR, the European bio-informatics infrastructure; and Knowledge Exchange, a partnership to promote open scholarship and improve services for higher education and research in Europe.
Per Öster has more than 30 years of experience in computational science from both academia and industry. He has a doctorate in physics from the Department of Physics, University of Gothenburg/Chalmers University of Technology.
Jan Hajič
OpenEuroLLM, Charles University
Jan Hajič
Project coordinator Open Euro LLM, Professor @ Charles University
Jan Hajič is a professor of Computational Linguistics at the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics, School of Computer Science, Charles University, Prague, Czechia. His interests span fundamental formal linguistic problems, machine translation, deep language understanding, and applications. He has built resources for many languages with rich linguistic annotation; he is currently leading a multi-institutional research infrastructure on open language resources in Czechia, LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ, and coordinating a EU projects on building LLMs, HPLT and OpenEuroLLM. His work experience includes both industrial research (IBM Research Yorktown Heights, NY, USA) and academia (Charles University, Prague, Czechia, Johns Hopkins University and University of Colorado, USA, Fellow of the Centre for Advanced Studies at the Norway Academy of Sciences, and others). He has published more than 200 papers with about 16,000 citations. He is a chair or member of many international and national boards and committees.
Wolfgang Oels
Ecosia
Wolfgang Oels
COO @ Ecosia
After his Engineering and Business studies, Wolfgang worked as a consultant for McKinsey & Company and subsequently held various senior leadership positions in the solar industry. Since 2016, he has been the COO of Ecosia, the biggest European search engine. He also serves as Director for “European Search Perspective,” an emerging competitor in the Internet Search industry, building a sovereign, European web index.
Gaël Duval
Murena
Gaël Duval
CEO @ Murena
Gaël Duval is a software engineer and entrepreneur. In 1998, he initiated Mandrake Linux, the first desktop Linux distribution aimed at a mainstream audience. More recently, he created /e/OS, a completely de-Googled and more sustainable mobile operating system that respects personal data and humans, which is marketed in Murena smartphones and cloud services.
Rob Van Kranenburg
Martel Innovate
Rob Van Kranenburg
Martel Innovate
Rob van Kranenburg is a writer who founded #IoT Council in 2009. He is a Member of General-Purpose AI Code of Practice EU Group and a working Group Member of The INPACE Hub on Smart Cities. IoT Council REG number in the EP Transparency Register is: REG 010977093819-34. He works as a Senior Policy and Communication Expert at Martel Innovate. In March 2025 he published ” Statecraft and Policymaking in the Age of Digital Twins. Digital Democracy and the Internet of Things.” (Springer Brief in Political Science).
Nicola Rustignoli
SCION Association
Nicola Rustignoli
Co-CEO @ SCION Association
Nicola Rustignoli is the co-CEO of the SCION Association, an industry consortium advancing SCION, a secure, reliable Internet architecture used in finance and critical infrastructure. The Association promotes global adoption by developing open technical specifications and maintaining the open-source SCION implementation. Before this role, Nicola worked in the network security industry and was a research assistant with the Network Security Group at ETH Zürich, where he contributed to The Complete Guide to SCION and several key research projects.