NGI Assure Programme Successfully Concluded

Flag with hexagons from NGI Assure projects.

NGI Assure, the programme aimed at improving trust in our digital society, successfully concluded on August 31, 2024. During its four year run, NGI Assure financially supported 152 Free and Open Source (FOSS) projects that contribute to a more trustworthy and secure internet. In total over 5.6 million Euro was awarded, averaging a financial contribution of on average 40,000 Euro per project.

NGI Assure was run by a coalition of three partners: Innovation Engineering, FundingBox and NLnet Foundation. The programme was funded by the European Commission as part of its Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative. NLnet continues to support FOSS projects within the NGI initiative with multiple NGI programmes currently running.

152 projects providing trust and security

The aim of the NGI Assure programme is to anchor and simplify establishing trust, and to make the usage of remote resources on the internet inherently more trustworthy and secure. The means to do that (as with all NGI programmes) is by supporting the grassroots efforts of people already working on these problems with small and medium size grants.

This resulted in 152 projects supported, involving no less than 365 different teams from 42 countries. The unifying factor: all of these projects worked on digital commons that improve our digital sovereignty, empower end users, increase systemic resilience and provide transparency, choice and self‐determination.

Meet the projects!

Meet the people!

When NGI Assure drew to an end, we invited people to write about their projects. This resulted in a series of interviews in which the builders of the Next Generation Internet talk about the problems they see with today's digital technologies and how their project addresses them.

To name but a few, there are interviews with Michael Baentsch of oqsprovider and Szilárd Pfeiffer of CryptoLyzer who both address the thorny problem of practically implementing cryptography. Esther Payne & Brett Sheffield explain how their project Librecast is a Human Rights project masquerading as a technology project. Or read how Aljoscha Meyer & Sam Gwilym address the problem of fragility with their project Earthstar + Willow. Here is an overview of all NGI Assure interviews.

Ongoing NGI programmes

The NGI Assure programme may have concluded, but other NGI programmes are still up and running. NLnet is involved in quite a few more active NGI programmes.

• NGI Zero Core: upgrading the internet architecture.
• NGI Zero Commons Fund: reclaiming the public nature of the Internet.
• NGI Taler: Privacy-preserving digital payments.
• Mobifree: More ethical and human mobile software.
• Fediversity: Creating the hosting stack of the future.

If you would like to contribute to the goals of these programmes you can apply for funding.

In addition there are two more programmes: NGI Zero Entrust: Trustworthiness and data sovereignty, is still running but the calls for participation have closed. And, lastly, NGI Zero Review supports beneficiaries from the NGI ecosystem with practical support such as security and accessibility audits and licensing compliance.

The wider Next Generation Initiative has more programmes running which you can find out about on the NGI.eu website.

Acknowledgements

NGI Assure ran from September 1^st 2020 to August 31^st 2024. The programme was made possible with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology. In order to better reflect the goals of the project, the name and acronym of the project were changed — previously the project was known as NGI-GO2S.

The programme received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 957073.