Seven New Projects Selected to Strengthen the NGI Pilot Programmes
We are happy to welcome on board seven free and open source projects that will contribute to the three NGI Pilot programmes. Pilots focus on a specific problem: NGI Taler works on privacy-preserving digital payments, NGI Fediversity builds the hosting stack of the future and NGI Mobifree is liberating the mobile landscape. Each Pilot has a dedicated consortium working on it but part of its budget - kindly provided by the European Commission - is reserved for third party funding. Through rolling open calls people can apply for budget to make meaningful contributions to the problems the Pilots address. We'd like to introduce seven new projects who will be joining the Pilots' efforts.
Linter and FOSS App repository for Android
IzzyOnDroid and OWASP blint will contribute to NGI Mobifree. NGI Mobifree is creating more ethical and humane mobile software for the Android ecosystem. IzzyOnDroid will be contributing with its third party repository for FOSS Android apps. Its intent is to provide useful apps, connecting a vibrant community of developers and users, with a focus on transparency, privacy, and security. OWASP blint had humble beginnings as a linter - a tool that analyses code for errors - but it soon found rapid adoption for a range of use cases such as malware identification, binary risk audits, and more recently binary SBOM generation.
Integrations of Taler payments
NGI Taler is working on an electronic payment system that offers privacy for those that make payments, while enforcing transparency on those that sell. The projects joining the Taler forces are Taler Open Banking Gateway which will provide the technology to top-up a Taler wallet in a regulatory compliant, instant and user-friendly way. The project Nuxt, a widely used JavaScript library for building web interfaces based on the lightweight Vue.js framework, will create a dedicated GNU Taler module for Nuxt. And Flohmarkt, which provides secure payments for P2P classified adds federating with ActivityPub, will integrate Taler payments into Flohmarkt.
Federation and integration for the hosting stack in-a-box
NGI Fediversity is a comprehensive effort to bring easy-to-use, hosted cloud services with service portability and personal freedom at their core to everyone. New on team Fediversity are two projects: Drupal, the free and open-source web content management system, will provide more comprehensive W3C ActivityPub support in Drupal. Source-based Nextcloud + Onlyoffice which will integrate the NixOS module for OnlyOffice with the libre filehosting solution Nextcloud.
If you applied for a grant
This is the selection for the October call and only for the Pilot programmes. We always inform all applicants about the outcome of the review ahead of the public announcement, if the are selected or not. If you have not heard anything, you probably applied to a later call or a different fund such as NGI Zero Core or NGI Zero Commons Fund. Later calls and the other funds are still under review. You can see which call you applied to by checking the application number assigned to the project when you applied. The second number in the sequence refers to the month of the call, so 10 in the case of the October call. (It should not happen, but if you did apply to the October call and did not hear anything, do contact us.)
Inspired? If you are working on a project that contributes to the Next Generation Internet you can submit a proposal. The next deadline is February 1st.
Acknowledgements
The NGI pilot programmes NGI Taler, NGI Fediversity and NGI Mobifree are possible with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology.
