ELFA Background information

Main page | Guide for Applicants | Eligibility | FAQ

Who is behind this?

ELFA is the result of a collaboration of eleven organisations. In alphabetical order:

Ananas Teknik (SE)

Ananas Teknik makes Bana, an app for privately sharing with the people in your life who matter most. It’s for reminding your future self of why today was special. It offers the intimacy of a group chat without the worry of oversharing. It’s an end-to-end encrypted personal social network you control on your devices. Bana’s design was inspired by several private social networks that attracted millions of users before shutting down (e.g. Path, Cocoon, Circle). Those products succeeded in solving an unmet need for people, but their business models failed to sustain the operation of the services. Bana moves the app logic and file storage to the network edge and onto users’ devices.

Danube Tech (AT)

Danube Tech is a research company involved with decentralized digital identity technologies in various communities and standardization efforts, most importantly at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) but also at Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF), Trust-over-IP Foundation (ToIP), IDunion, and other organisations. Danube Tech's objective is to build the bridges that interconnect all decentralized identity networks globally. This enables interoperable identity applications and services for everyone. Danube Tech's Markus Sabadello was co-editor of the W3C Decentralized Identifiers (DID) standard.

IronCalc (DE)

IronCalc is an open source, Rust-based spreadsheet engine designed to be lightweight, fast, flexible, high-performance and easily embeddable in other applications. It offers Excel-compatible functions, multiple language bindings, and a modern web interface, making it a powerful foundation for building spreadsheet-driven SaaS products and tools. Competing spreadsheet technologies are often closed-source, heavy and difficult to extend, whereas IronCalc offers openness, interoperability, and developer-friendly APIs, making it well suited for integration into other applications. IronCalc enables powerful collaborative editing and analytical capabilities wherever it is needed.

NextGraph Association (FR)

NextGraph Association is the home of NextGraph, an open source sync protocol and framework, with the aim of enabling a truly decentralized and privacy-preserving internet. It is based on several innovative technologies that make it perfectly suited for the challenges we are facing today regarding digital strategic autonomy and resilience. It features an end-to-end encrypted sync protocol for CRDTs, notably for Yjs and RDF (Linked Data, Semantic Data), a decentralized graph database, and provides an SDK and a framework for developing web-based and native apps.

NLnet Foundation (coordinator – NL)

Public benefit organisation that introduced the internet in Europe in the eighties, and has since become one of the most prolific grant makers in the libre and open source ecosystem. NLnet is the driving force behind the Next Generation Internet initiative's NGI Zero. NLnet is coordinator of ELFA and several sibling efforts within the new Open Internet Stack effort such as Restack and CodeSupply.

Ontola/Argu B.V. (NL)

Ontola is a software development company specialized in web applications, SaaS development and LinkedData, with a particular interest in innovation, open data and open technology. Ontola has been building web applications for over 10 years, with a focus on tools that give users ownership over their data. The name Ontola ("Ontological Applications") denotes the commitment to the semantic web, an internet where data can be re-used between applications, where data does not live in locked silos at big cloud companies — but lives on the machine of the end user under their full control. Ontola maintains Atomic Data (a specification offering semantic web capabilities with modern developer conveniences like JSON and type safety) and its reference implementation AtomicServer.

OpenBlocks B.V. (NL)

OpenBlocks is the company behind BlockNote, the open source, block-based rich-text editor for the web. BlockNote enables developers to seamlessly add collaborative document editing to their products. What used to be a complex engineering challenge limited to large tech companies with substantial resources has now become accessible to startups, SMEs, and enterprises of all kinds. BlockNote is a widely adopted open source library, with hundreds of thousands of monthly downloads, and an active global developer community. BlockNote is used by key initiatives such as La Suite Numérique (DINUM) and OpenDesk (ZenDis), putting it at the front of public sector initiatives to develop sovereign digital workspaces. The OpenBlocks team is deeply embedded in the emerging local-first research community, contributing through both open source libraries and novel applications that are widely adopted online and have been presented at leading academic venues. The company brings expertise in text editing software, CRDTs, local-first software architectures, and end-user programming models.

Sunny Cat (ES)

Sunny Cat is a software development company with 15 years of software development experience in distributed systems, web servers, and client-side applications. Experience includes intricate, interactive dashboards for large-scale operations systems related to video game streaming for PlayStation, and helping governments and non-profits around the world bring their open data to life with visualizations and narratives via collaborative text and visualization editing software. The Sunny Cat team has designed and scaled customer experiences to 100s of millions of customers across retail websites and mobile applications, as well as developed mapping technologies and text editing technologies.

Ura Design (DE)

Ura Design is a Berlin-based design studio specializing in usability forensics, design systems, and accessibility for open source and privacy-preserving technologies. Ura brings over a decade of experience designing for complex software, connecting scientific research, policy, and advocacy into coherent, trusted narratives. Ura has collaborated with partners such as The Tor Project, Open Technology Fund, Internews, Censored Planet (University of Michigan), Hessian.AI, and Mozilla. Ura combines proven experience within open source ecosystems with accessibility expertise (WCAG 2.2 AA+, EN 301 549, ADA compliance), in order to make sure that tools are inclusive and future-proof. Ura actively participates in the Open Source Design community.

XWiki (FR/RO)

XWiki SAS is creator of productivity tools XWiki and CryptPad Platforms, providing an alternative to widely used proprietary solutions such as Atlassian Confluence, Google Docs or Microsoft Office and Microsoft Loop. With its 70 employees and over the span of more than two decades, XWiki has built a loyal customer base of thousands of organizations and hundreds of thousands of users. Its CryptPad software is an advanced end-to-end encrypted collaboration platform allowing users to collaborate confidentially in real-time on many types of document.

2WEBAPP (HU)

2WEBAPP focuses on Open XR/VR/AR/MR research and open source development & innovation. Its CEO Leon van Kammen, authored the Open XR Fragments Specification — an interoperability layer for 3D experiences. The company has launched projects like SearXR, an open source XR-compatible meta-searchengine for AR/VR experiences on WebXR devices (like Meta Quest) and smartphone VR.

The money for ELFA is kindly provided by the European Commission's DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology.

Review Committee

NLnet has installed a Review Committee for ELFA. This Review Committe consists of independent experts from the internet and open source field, academia and the public sector. The committee is appointed for a period of one year, with the possiblity of renewal. The committee receives no remuneration for its work, and its members have no other economic interests with any projects funded by ELFA.

The Review Commitee receives the outcome of the selection process, and independently validates that all the projects that are selected are indeed eligible for funding, budgets are frugal, and that there are no other concerns.