Support services

• Accessibility best practices and tooling for self-tests
• WCAG audit of project results

Webinar about this support service
Watch the recording of the webinar on accessibility with Charlotte Swart who leads the auditing team for NGI0 projects. She shares the most common issues and gives a live demo of an accessibility audit.

Inclusive design makes it possible for everyone to use technology. Many more people than you might assume suffer from small but blocking issues in using technology. These hamper their careers, education and — and often unnecessarily so. Small adjustments can make a world of difference, but how do you know which adjustments are needed so that color-blind people can use your app, people with a tremor can fill out a form or people with limited cognitive abilities can figure out what to do.

• Best practices community building
• Strategic advice on developing project sustainability

The mentor organisations can help projects consider the phase after their grant runs out: setting up crowd funding, applying for additional grants, starting a company or building an ecosystem of partners that are interested in sustaining the project. The mentoring organisation have experience with each of these scenario's, and can assist with practical tips and contacts.

New projects are filled with energy and ambition, but sometimes you need some outside wisdom and experience. We offer support from two different mentor organisations, each with a strong reputation in building FOSS communities and versed in their structure, ethics, and values. Mentors offer a listening ear when you need it, and help make connections to other relevant efforts inside and outside of NGI. They offer practical lessons learned from rich experience with many other projects, and can help to solve communication problems and startup challenges. They help understand and cultivate the NGI Vision inside the projects, and act as bees cross-polinating new developments and best practices. Everything needed to make sure the project can target what it set out to accomplish.

• Best practices copyrights and license compliance
• Assist with tooling and creation of SPDX headers
• Legal strategy on emerging copyright issue

Webinar about this support service
Watch the Free Software Legal Education Workshop. FSFE explains the legal basics of of licensing and gives a demonstration how to make licensing your Free Software projects easier.

A lot of software starts off with existing source code, as there is plenty of that available on the internet — and it is not always clear whether there is a proper open source license attached. For developers under time pressure, eager to get results and functionality out the door sooner rather than later — and not everyone is aware of legal considerations when doing so. Copyright compliance management isn't glamorous work, but can save a lot of trouble later on. Using best current practices like Reuse.Software one can avoid the pitfalls of compliance.

• Help build a more diverse developer community
• Receive wider input, more representative of the global and heterogeneous internet
• Gender Evaluation Methodoloy (GEM)

The internet is for everyone, not just for the lucky few. What do you know about global needs and constraints, and about best practises for open source projects to improve diversity? How to structure a project to avoid negative interactions within your community such as rudeness, name-calling and stereotyping? How to embed the perspective of the global South, where people do not all have the latest smartphone or 5G connectivity. We can help connect the projects to non-obvious communities, so you can directly interact with them.

• Best practices on localisation and internationalisation (i18n)
• Support with setting up translation infrastructure

Video about this support service
Watch this video to learn the purpose of this service and what to expect when you request it. It's a 3-minute presentation by Dwayne Bailey of Translate House who is one of the experts offering this service.

Requesting technical writing
You can request the service through NLnet's general request form or by emailing Commons Caretakes: support@commonscaretakers.

Software may seem universal, but can actually be quite specific to linguistic and cultural influences. While many in the tech scene assume that everybody understands fluent English, lack of support for other languages can be a significant barrier to broad adoption. Even within Europe, in some countries 80% of the population has problems with understanding technical English. Moreover, for many users, their mother tongue represents more than the technicalities of language. Not only that, but the cultural dimensions of technology are different across cultures (in varying degrees of subtlety), and these differences are actually very meaningful to people. Europe is a continent of linguistic and cultural diversity, a continent of regions and of variety. So how can you design your technology in such a way that users from anywhere in the world feel at home and productive with it?

• Best practices on packaging and reproducible builds
• Reproducible packaging with Nix

It is important for a project that is meant to scale to gather traction as early as possible. There should be a convenient and easy to obtain development and testing environment, to ensure people that are interested have a low barrier of entry. We support the team to set up their technical infrastructure with Nix. Nix is a powerful vendor-agnostic package solution for Linux, Mac OS X and other Unix systems that makes package management reliable and reproducible. It provides atomic upgrades and rollbacks, side-by-side installation of multiple versions of a package, multi-user package management and easy setup of build environments. By using the unique capabilities of Nix, and associated projects like NixOps and NixOS, complex dependencies (such as services) can be managed. This way the project is able to have a cross-distro development and delivery system that is easy to integrate with continuous integration, and allows anyone to easily check in to the development process of the projects. It also creates full transparency: the entire setup is declarative and allows for reproducible builds, so every source origin and every patch is completely verifiable.

• Best practices on security
• Security audit

Webinar about this support service
Watch the recording of the webinar on security audits with Melanie Rieback, co-fouder and CEO of ROS and Andrea Jegher, Information Security Engineer. They explain what you can expect from an security audit and encourage you to request an audit. Don't feel like your project is not yet ready. The sooner the better because security-by-design works best.

Every project needs to earn the trust of users over time, and long term trust depends on the trustworthiness of your output. Young and ambitious projects tend to overestimate their level of sophistication and understanding in terms of security. This can bring users into potentially dangerous situations.

Living up to high security standards is important, and so we offer a professional security audit. The results are sent confidentially to the team, and can be made public through a standard coordinated disclosure procedure.

• Advice and help on setting up and improving testing
• Designing and developing test suites
• Performance and scalability tests
• Support with setting up integration pipelines
• Usability testing
• Software quality engineering

Webinar about this support service
Watch the recording of the webinar on multiple support services where Julian Harty, who offers this service, explains what you can expect from help with testing.

Projects can apply for help with testing. The testing setup of your project will be reviewed and advice can be given on how to improve or extend it.

If software is not tested, users may be dissappointed causing adoption to be low. Sometimes software development could do with a fresh outside perspective which highlight issues within the code.

Requesting software testing
You can request the service through NLnet's general request form or by emailing Commons Caretakes: support@commonscaretakers.

• Best practices on standardisation
• Custom advice on standardisation strategy

Webinar about this support service
Watch the recording of the webinar The GNU Name System (GNS) and the road to publishing an RFC with Martin Schanzenbach, Bernd Fix and Stephen Farrell. Martin and Bernd co-authored RFC 9498 on the GNS together with Christian Grothoff. In the first part of the webinar Martin explains how the GNS works.

In the second part of the webinar, Martin relates the story of interacting with the IETF to get the RFC published. Stephen Farrell of Tolerant Networks then explains, how he and his colleagues can help with interacting with standards bodies.

Open standards are an essential component of the openness of the internet. Dealing with standards setting organisations as a relative outsider can be a good lesson in humility though. Standards bodies often have meritocratic characteristics, and processes with very specific timing, meaning that newcomers can be at a disadvantage. There are historical precedents and unwritten rules to be taken into account. The actual decision making turns out to be more complex and time-consuming than it seemed at first instance. And sometimes there is a clash of interests (the privacy or security feature you want may ruin someone's nefarious but working business model), which can be very frustrating. Long battles have been fought over insignificant issues as well as over fundamental chasms, and it is unfortunately not a given that the debate is always won by the right party or in a fair way.

Not every project may need to interface with a standards setting organisation, but for those that do we provide guidance and mentoring throughout the process, and can help introduce projects to relevant stakeholders to collaborate and build alliances. This does not deliver guarantees on successfully reaching a standard, but it can significantly increase their chances.

• Review existing copy and suggest improvements
• Technical documentation, white papers
• User guides, technical specifications

Webinar about this support service
Watch the recording of the webinar on multiple support services where Jenny List, one of the experts offering this service, explains what to expect from help with technical writing.

Requesting technical writing
You can request the service through NLnet's general request form or by emailing Commons Caretakes: support@commonscaretakers.

A key component of technical writing is to convey complex information in a simple manner. By looking at things such as purpose, target audience, content, structure, and style you can assure yourself that information is effectively communicated resulting in effortless installation and adoption of your project.

• User research
• Usability testing
• Advice on user interface design, user flows and journey maps

Video about this support service
Watch this video to learn the purpose of UX testing and what to expect when you request the service. It is a 5-minute presentation by Marjolein Kassenaar who is one of the UX experts offering this service.

Requesting UX testing
You can request the service through NLnet's general request form or by emailing Commons Caretakes: support@commonscaretakers.

UX testing is an essential aspect of user-centred design. It helps ensure that the design meets users’ needs, goals, and expectations. Understanding how users interact with your software isn't just nice to have. Poor usability is a barrier to adoption and retention. Many great projects struggle, not because of their core functionality, but because users find them difficult to understand and to navigate.

You can start UX or usability testing at any moment in the development process, and depending on the problem, there are different techniques to test how usable your product is by asking users, by observing them when they complete certain tasks and other ways.