NGI Zero Entrust Background information

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Who is behind this?

The effort to fund 9.6 million euro of R&D on technology commons that improve privacy, trustworthiness, resilience and user control make these available as free/libre/open source software and hardware is a project called NGI Zero Entrust. This is a significant effort by a large group of organisations:

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

The Faculty of Information Technology of Brno University of Technology represents the second-largest technical university in the Czech Republic. It comprises 8 faculties with more than 23,000 students and 3,000 staff members.

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.

Free Software Foundation Europe - Association charity that aims to empower users to control technology.

HAN University of Applied Sciences, dept. Inclusive Design & Engineering - one of the core competence building centres of accessibility in the Netherlands, with significant in-house expertise on accessibility auditing.

NixOS Foundation - Foundation supporting development and use of purely functional configuration management tools, in particular NixOS and related projects.

NLnet Foundation - 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.

Tolerant Networks - a Trinity College Dublin campus company focused on robust interoperable communications mechanisms for extreme and unpredictable environments, which delivers its standardisation experience.

In addition we collaborate with:

• Accessibility Foundation - Center of expertise on accessibility of internet and other digital media for all people, including the elderly and people with disabilities
• Translate House - Develops and implements open source localization solutions
• ifrOSS - Provides not-for-profit legal services and studies in the context of free and open source software

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

The first and primary objective of NGI Zero Entrust 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. It shares this goal with its predecessors NGI0 PET and 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 several other efforts such as NGI Zero Review, that offers various complementary services to grantees of the various NGI programmes to help make them economically sustainable where possible. It offers (at no cost) optional tailor-made support.

Review Committee

NLnet has installed a Review Committee for the NGI0 Entrust Fund. 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 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.