Michiel Leenaars Speaks at FOSDEM about NGI and Europe's Digital Sovereignty
NLnet's Director of Strategy, Michiel Leenaars, will present the opening talk at one of FOSDEM's main tracks on Sunday February 2, 2025. He will discuss Europe's ambition to increase its digital sovereignty in relation to the Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative, one of the largest funding programmes for free and open source (FOSS) technologies in the world. He will address NGI's contribution to technological sovereignty, the future of its funding and where to go next.
This talk goes back to the first presentation of NGI to the FOSS community: in 2018 the study Next Generation Internet 2025 was presented at FOSDEM to then-MEP Marietje Schaake by a team from NLnet Foundation and Gartner Europe. At that point in time, the European Commission's (EC) NGI initiative was just about to get started. The report laid out a practical vision for what such an initiative could aim to become - based on input from a consultation by the authors across the European tech and digital rights community.
The unspoken ambition for NGI was to start reducing Europe's dangerous dependency on big tech companies running dark code in foreign jurisdictions. The report defined a number of strategic objectives and considerations, centered around user empowerment - and with an underlying ambition to improve our digital sovereignty and create the technology stack we want.
In this talk Leenaars will look back on how the NGI initiative worked out so far - and where it can and should go next. With hundreds of thousands of developer hours funded across all layers of technology through programmes like NGI Zero, the NGI has pushed technological sovereignty more than any other EC supported effort. So far more than 1300 projects have been funded making NGI one of the largest free and open source (FOSS) funding programmes ever to exist. But although the NGI initiative seems to have delivered, so far is not included in the European Commissions plan's for future programmes.
Europe's problematic technological entanglement isn't solved yet, in fact: the situation is arguably more dire than ever. The geopolitical climate calls for technological disentanglement and a strategic move to FOSS and digital commons. In that light Leenaars will address the following questions: What should our new European Commissioner Henna Virkkunen, executive vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy be working on for the next five years of the 'digital decade'? Starting from the vantage point of the Next Generation Internet initiative in 2025, where do we go?
Practical information on how to participate
The talk will take place at FOSDEM's main track in the K-Building on Sunday February 2 at 09.00. FOSDEM provides a live stream and the ability to join the conversation via chat.
FOSDEM is the world’s largest gathering of free and open source software enthusiasts and open to everyone and free of charge. You don't even need to register. It takes place in at the ULB Solbosch Campus in Brussels in the weekend of February 1-2, 2025.
