Interviews

Don't miss the opportunity to get funded, apply! NGI Search 1st Open CallBecome an NGI Searcher! We are looking for entrepreneurs, tech-geeks, developers, socially engaged people, SMEs, research organisations, academic research groups, non-profit organisations, to change the way we search and discover data and information on the Internet. Opening date: 1st December 2022 Closing date: 1st of February 2023, at 17:00 CET Short description: There is up to €150,000 available in this call for you. We are looking for those who can strongly demonstrate that they contribute towards the scope of NGI SEARCH – that is to change the way we use and experience, search and discover data and resources on the internet and web. Selected projects will benefit in a number of ways: Joining the NGI SEARCH Support Programme with a duration of up to 12 months Receiving funding of up to €50,000 if the applicant is a natural person applying on their behalf or up to €150,000 if the applicant is applying as an organisation Option to receive Technical, Business and Innovation mentoring provided by the NGI Search project partners Target participants: Open Call applicants can be entrepreneurs, tech-geeks, developers, socially engaged people, SMEs (including newly established organisations), research organisations, academic research groups, non-profit organisations etc.For the purposes of the application process, applicant types are divided into two main groups: Natural Persons who reside in an EU Member State or in Horizon Europe Associated Countries Organisations officially registered in an EU Member State or in Horizon Europe Associated Countries The project also accepts consortia of natural persons, consortia of organisations or consortia of natural persons and organisations, meeting the eligibility criteria described above. However, there is a limit of 3 members per team. Visit: ngi-search-open-call.fundingbox.comApply: ngi-search-open-call.fundingbox.com/signin Contact for more info: https://spaces.fundingbox.com/spaces/the-next-generation-internet-ngi-community-ngi-search    

Don't miss the opportunity to get funded, apply! NGI ZERO ENTRUST 4th Open CallTrustworthiness and data sovereignty Opening date: 1st December 2022 Closing date: 1st February 2023, 12:00 PM CEST (Brussels time) Short description:  We need a more resilient, trustworthy and open internet, empowering the end-users. Trust is only justified and sustainable if it the technology in question is up for the job, and is secure-by-design as well as trustworthy. Much of the software, services and devices does not measure up, and it is quite unlikely this will just improve by itself. NGI0 Entrust is designed to move beyond the status quo and create a virtuous cycle of innovation through free and open source software, libre hardware and open standards. If we want everyone to use and benefit from the internet to its full potential without holding back, the internet must be built on strong and transparent technologies that allow for permissionless innovation and are equally accessible to all. Target participants: Independent researchers and developers to create powerful new technologies, and to help them put it in the hands of future generations as building blocks for a fair and democratic society and a sustainable and open economy that benefits all. Visit: nlnet.nl/entrustApply: nlnet.nl/propose Contact for more info: nlnet.nl/entrust  

Apply and get funded! NGI ASSURE 13th Open Call Trust is the basis for social value and self-organisation, but technical assurances are what help make it trustworthy. Opening date: 1st December 2022 Closing date: 15th February 2023, 12:00 PM CEST (Brussels time) Short description:  NGI Assure is looking for building blocks that contribute to providing such assurances include (but are not limited to) quantum-proof cryptography, public key infrastructure, (augmented) authenticated key exchange, ratchet mechanisms (such as the Noise protocol) that securely chain key material, distributed hash tables and DAGs to make P2P interaction more secure, conflict-free replicated data types, mixnets and onion routing mechanisms, consensus protocols, distributed ledgers and (post) blockchain technologies that create redundant data sets managed independently by mutually distrustful parties, a priori usage control, symbolic and formal proofs, and tamperproof open hardware implementations of core cryptographic primitives. The work needs to become available under free and open source licenses. We are looking for deep tech components; the outcomes of NGI Assure shall contribute towards identifying and solving current issues, but do not need to provide a complete solution by themselves. NGI Assure enables collaboration among humans without unjustified trust.We need your contributions to help reshape the state of play, and to help create an open, trustworthy and reliable internet for all. And of course such contributions do not happen automatically. This is why we will award 5.6 million Euro in small to medium-size R&D grants towards R&D efforts and free and open source projects that can deliver the above. We are looking for new ideas and core technologies that help society tackle hard but very very important questions, each of which has significant social and economic consequences. We are seeking project proposals between 5 000 and 50 000 Euro – with the potential to scale them up if there is proven potential. Instead of just handing over...

Apply and get funded! NGI ENRICHERS 1st call “Paired Teams”The NGI Transatlantic Fellowship program is seeking to engage NGI Researchers and Innovators Opening date: 30 November 2022 Closing date: 31 January 2023 Short description:  The NGI Transatlantic Fellowship program is seeking to engage NGI Researchers and Innovators, both with a technical or social sciences and humanities background. Applicants can find general information on the fellowship programme on the European applicants – NGI Enrichers page.The 1st Call for Paired teams will select up to 12 applicants. The selected applicants will spend 3-6 months in the US or Canada to collaborate with the Host organisations, enhancing knowledge-sharing and establishing long-term collaborations on NGI technologies, services, and standards. Target participants: The NGI Transatlantic Fellowship program is seeking to engage NGI Researchers and Innovators, including researchers with technical background, or Social Sciences and the Humanities (SSH) background, or from other multidisciplinary fields e.g. working at the intersection of social and natural sciences. Visit: https://enrichers.ngi.eu/evaluators/ Apply: https://enrichers.ngi.eu/apply-here/ Contact for more info: https://enrichers.ngi.eu/contact/

All NGI DAPSI data portability solutions at one place.  We are happy to inform you that all data portability solutions developed by our amazing teams are now available at ngi.eu website.  

Meet CLISK - A team which goes beyond the portability right by developing an open-source personal robot system, to get your data, on your request, from your device. Learn more from this interview with Paul Tran-Van. Can you briefly introduce yourself and your team? Cozy Cloud was funded in 2012 in France and since then develops the Cozy platform, a user-centric and privacy-focused open-source platform. It aims at giving back users their personal data so they can use it under their own terms. All the team members have been working at Cozy Cloud for many years and share the same core values in open-source software, user privacy and empowerment. The team firmly believes that true user empowerment cannot be achieved without easy-to-use and efficient software, without compromising on security and privacy. The CLISK project is a natural evolution of the Cozy platform, that enable data sovereignty for the users over their data. Our motto is “You will stay because you can leave”, as any citizen should have the right and capacity to store and move her data in any place under her control, with her own policies. What is your motivation to work in the data portability field? Nowadays, our personal data is scattered across many silos over the internet. Thanks to the GDPR, one can now ask for its own data to a third-party in the name of data portability. However, we argue that this right is currently broken: the GDPR does not specify portability modalities and there is no incentive for a third-party to ease the life of the users expressing their rights. This generally results by sending an email to each provider, sometimes with an identity proof, and wait for a response within a month, which is, most of the time, unsatisfied. We believe that it is unmanageable for the common citizen...

Meet PROFIBIT - A team which helps you to make your data profitable. Learn more from this interview with Vassilis Papataxiarhis. Can you briefly introduce yourself and your team? INTELLIA is a technological SME targeting innovation in the areas of artificial intelligence and data interoperability. INTELLIA has been working since many years with Semantic Web technologies and knowledge representation and reasoning tools. The team consists of highly motivated and skilled individuals with a background in data science, software engineering, and cloud infrastructures. Combining a wide range of skills, the Profibit team has the right mix of people required to carry out demanding technical tasks and transform ideas into successful commercial solutions. Considering the personalised advertising domain of Profibit, our team has already established a network of strategic partnerships to adopt the solution and it owns RUN247, one of the biggest portals for running in Greece with more than 3.000 visits per day on average (www.run247.gr), that acts as a beta user for the validation of Profibit. What is your motivation to work in the data portability field? Profibit develops the intermediate layer to facilitate switches between data providers in the domain of athletic portals and services. The current business network of the company includes the organisers of the most significant running events in Greece and a set of companies already advertised through RUN247 web portal. The platform maintains user profiles of runners including personal data. A typical problem RUN247 faces each time a new user registers the portal is the limited capability to re-use existing data profiles from similar portals (e.g., personal records, participation in past events, statistics). Profibit builds on top of this pragmatic need by developing a data interoperability use-case between a real product and external platforms for runners such as Strava, and Garmin. Profibit constitutes a great opportunity for INTELLIA...

Meet OKH P&I - A team which is enabling design portability. Learn more from this interview with Max Wardeh. Can you briefly introduce yourself and your team? The  Internet of Production Alliance works with the global maker community on building open standardised systems and protocols that allow digital fabrication machines, open hardware, and manufacturing spaces to connect across the world. Lukas Schattenhofer - Board member of Open-Source Ecology. Is leading a project on Community Reviews of Open-Source Hardware according to DIN Spec 3105. Andrew Lamb - Chair and co-founder of the IOPA, Innovation Advisor for Field Ready. Former CEO and co-founder of Engineers Without Borders.  Max Wardeh - The technical coordinator of the IOPA and founder of Open Connective Ltd. Barbara Schack - Coordinator of the IOPA. Led the innovation portfolio at Libraries without Borders, developing MVPs for offline access to internet-based content.  Robin Vobruba - A Software Architect and Developer working on advancing the OKH standard with the Fraunhofer IPK. Sarah Hutton – Research and Community Engagement Lead at the IOPA and research affiliate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. What is your motivation to work in the data portability field? To enable distributed manufacturing, members of the Internet of Production Alliance need to be able to share details of hardware projects including design and documentation files for the products that they want to have manufactured. Currently, the main option for sharing these files is to host them on platforms that can limit the ability to share and control their dissemination. This led us to want to develop standards and tools that enable anyone who needs to share their hardware project files with others avoid any vendor lock-in and share these files without having to rely on proprietary platforms for hosting. In simple words, what challenges does your project address? Makers, designers, engineers, and others who are involved...

Meet Content Libraries and Editing: A team of true believers in open standards, open source technology, and the freedom to move your data. Learn more from this interview with Fox Piacenti.  Can you briefly introduce yourself and your team? My name is Fox Piacenti, and I’m with OpenCraft. We’re a global distributed team incorporated in Germany. We’ve been all-remote since our inception back in 2013, and we specialize in open source software, especially the Open edX online learning platform. What is your motivation to work in the data portability field? We’re firm believers in open standards, open source technology, and the freedom to move your data. We choose to open source our projects and favor the AGPLv3 license. Our focus on data portability is a natural extension of this mindset– if you cannot move your data, reuse it, and manipulate it for your needs, then your software controls you, and not the other way around. In simple words, what challenges does your project address? Our project, Content Libraries and Editing, allows instructors to reuse educational content they’ve written in multiple courses and beyond. As more and more learning happens online, the ability to remix and reuse content becomes an ever more pressing need. What solution are you developing? We’re developing the next generation of content library functionality for the Open edX online learning platform. This allows content authors to create reusable blocks for insertion into courses, as well as a set of APIs that allow technically inclined teams to display the content in contexts outside of courses as desired. This has required not only building new content storage technologies to handle the needs of massive online open courses, but also new authoring tools using modern web technologies to replace the older authoring tools that have been the mainstay of the Open edX platform up until this point. What are...

Meet PLACE - An open source personal knowledge server, powered by Atomic Data. Learn more from this interview with Joep Meindertsma. Can you briefly introduce yourself and your team? We are Ontola and Applied Knowledge systems, two small software companies who specialize in building open source software that helps people to have more control over their data. Ontola is a Dutch tech company. They have developed Argu.co, an e-democracy platform that helps governments to engage their citizens in decision making processes. Their team consists of four people, three of which develop software. Ontola has decided to fully focus on developing Atomic Data and its implementation, Atomic Server. Applied Knowledeg Systems (AKS) is a UK-based software and consulting firm that specialises in knowledge management software. AKS is developing the Terraphim search engine, which uses AI to provide users with better ways to search through their own data. Terraphim is partially powered by Atomic Data. What is your motivation to work in the data portability field? We believe that data portability is essential to protecting the best interests of individuals. Tech giants have the power to build extremely well-integrated software that is very convenient to use, but built on vendor lock-in. Switching from the Office 365 to Google Docs, for example, is very difficult. We need open standards that help to make switching costs as low as possible. The big tech companies do not have any incentive to fund this. Even smaller software companies tend to try finding a lock-in strategy, as that helps get their company funded by VCs. So we need projects like DAPSI that fill this gap! In simple words, what challenges does your project address? We focus on making data models easily reusable. This means: developers should easily be able to verify any data, make sure that it conforms to some shape, without having to...