The goal of the NGI Zero Commons Fund is to help deliver, mature and scale new internet commons across the whole technology spectrum, from libre silicon to middleware, from P2P infrastructure to convenient end user applications.
This holistic, full-stack approach is needed if we want to reclaim the public nature of the internet and yield the full benefits from technology as a society.
Free and open source software and hardware, open standards, open data & AI, open science, creative commons and open educational resources are democratising innovation and learning, and are together driving society and industry forward at an unprecedented pace.
Between now and 2027 we will award small to medium-size R&D grants between 5.000 and 50.000 euro — with the possibility to scale them up significantly if there is proven potential. Besides grants we offer support services to improve the quality and maturity of digital commons. Grantees can request support with security, privacy, accessibility, open source licensing compliance, standardisation and more. In total the NGI Zero Commons Fund will distribute 21.6 million euros of R&D on technology commons that improve openness, trustworthiness, resilience and user autonomy, and make these available as free/libre/open
source software and hardware.
NGI Zero Commons Fund is a significant effort by a large group of organisations:
- Association Professionnelle Européenne du Logiciel Libre – APELL is Europe’s Open Source Business Association bringing national Open Source Software (‘OSS’) organisations together into a European network.
- Association for Progressive Communications – A global network and organisation that strives towards easy and affordable access to a free and open internet to improve the lives of people and create a more just world.
- Center for the Cultivation of Technology – A charitable non-profit host organisation for international Free Software projects
- Commons Caretakers – A not-for-profit service provider for the development of Common.
- Free Silicon Foundation – Foundation with the scope of promoting: free and Open Source (FOS) CAD tools for designing integrated circuits, sharing of hardware designs and libraries, common standards, and the freedom of users in the context of silicon integrated circuits.
- Free Software Foundation Europe – Association charity aims to empower users to control technology.
- HAN University of Applied Sciences, dept. Inclusive Design & Engineering – one of the core competence building centres of accessibility in the Netherlands, with significant in-house expertise on accessibility auditing.
- Internet Society Switzerland – ISOC.ch is a recognized Chapter of the global Internet Society, founded in 1992.
- NixOS Foundation – Foundation supporting development and use of purely functional configuration management tools, in particular NixOS and related projects.
- NLnet Foundation – Grantmaking public benefit organisation founded by pioneers of the early European internet
- OpenForum Europe – A European open source software and open standard not-for-profit think tank. Its key objective is to contribute to achieve an open and competitive Digital ecosystem in Europe.
- OW2 – OW2 is an independent, global, open-source software community that fosters open source projects and actually delivers software. The only such non-profit open source organisation of EU origin and DNA.
- Radically Open Security – Not-for-profit open source security company
- Tolerant Networks – a Trinity College Dublin campus company focused on robust interoperable communications mechanisms for extreme and unpredictable environments, which delivers its standardisation experience.
NGI Zero Commons Fund Coordinator: Michiel Leenaars, ngizero-coordinator@nlnet.nl
Website: https://nlnet.nl/commonsfund/