Calls: Send in your ideas. Deadline April 1, 2024

NGI Zero PET Background information

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Who is behind this?

The effort to fund 5.6 million euro of R&D on privacy & trust enhancing technologies and make these available as free/libre/open source software is a project called NGI Zero PET. This is a significant effort by a large group of organisations:

The money for this is kindly provided by the European Commission DG CNECT.

The first and primary objective of NGI Zero PET is to provide an agile, effective and low-threshold funding mechanism to enable individual researchers and developers, as well as small (potentially distributed) teams of them, to research and develop important new ideas that contribute to the establishment of the Next Generation Internet. We have a sister project called NGI0 Discovery.

Our humble mission is to enable the best people to work - by themselves and together - on their most relevant ideas in the best possible way, using short non-bureaucratic funding cycles and to iteratively mature the most promising ideas through an elaborate 'pipeline' of supporting activities that live up to high standards (sometimes called 'walk the talk') in terms of security, privacy, accessibility, open source licensing, standardisation, etc.

In addition the European Commission has funded an independent project called TETRA, that offers various complementary services to grantees of NGI0 and similar programmes to help make them economically sustainable where possible. It offers (at no cost) optional tailor-made support to projects to help understand opportunities, and assists in building business capacities for those projects that have a need for them.

Review Committee

NLnet will install a Review Committee for the PET Fund. This Review Committe shall consist 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 NGI0.

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.

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