NGI Zero Discovery Background information
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Who is behind this?
The effort to fund 5.6 million euro of R&D on search & discovery and make these available as free/libre/open source software is a project called NGI Zero Discovery. This is a significant effort by a large group of organisations:
- Accessibility Foundation - Center of expertise on accessibility of internet and other digital media for all people, including the elderly and people with disabilities
- 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 organization for international Free Software projects
- Commons Caretakers - A not-for-profit service provider for the development of Commons
- Network Security Group of Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich - Academic research institute focused on building secure and robust network systems
- Free Software Foundation Europe - Association charity that aims to empower users to control technology.
- ifrOSS - Provides not-for-profit legal services and studies in the context of free and open source software
- NixOS Foundation - Foundation supporting development and use of purely functional configuration management tools, in particular NixOS and related projects
- NLnet Foundation (NL) - Grantmaking public benefit organisation founded by pioneers of the early European internet
- Petites Singularités - Non profit organisation working with free sofware and focusing on collective practices
- Radically Open Security - Not-for-profit open source security company
- TIMIT - Experts in secure software
- Translate House - Develops and implements open source localization solutions
The money for this is kindly provided by the European Commission.
The first and primary objective of NGI Zero Discovery 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 PET.
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 Search & Discovery Fund. This Review Committe will 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.
