Services + Applications

AREXERA Crawler — C++ based web crawler

The AREXERA web crawler dates back to the early 2000's when AREXERA GmbH (former TECOMAC GmbH) wrote it as part of a toolset to run public search engines like Seekport in Germany and some other European countries. The AREXERA crawler is written in C++ and was designed from the ground up for speed. The crawler supports the common features, like TLS support, robots.txt, politeness rules and WARC file output. The tool was in full production use until the company went out of business, and subsequently development stopped for a while. Recently the code resurfaced, and AREXERA was reborn as a free and open source project. Recent first tests showed still promising performance compared to other widely crawlers. The aim of the project is to bring the crawler up to date with modern requirements and clean up the code, so it can be properly benchmarked with a representative workload - after all, high crawling speed means faster throughput and a lower power consumption per fetched web page.

>> Read more about AREXERA Crawler

Autocrypt for Thunderbird — Make email encryption extremely simple

Autocrypt is a specification that provides guidance for e-mail clients on how to achieve a seamless user experience. It does so by transparently exchanging keys, almost entirely automating public key management. This reduces the UI to "single click for encryption". The project will create an extension for the Thunderbird e-mail client that brings this experience to its users. The goal is to provide a new extension with a streamlined user experience that requires as little user interaction as possible, without "poweruser" features and performing practical user testing to identify open pain points. The extension will be based on OpenPGP.js, since this can be packaged directly. This will simplify installation and maintenance a great deal.

>> Read more about Autocrypt for Thunderbird

BBBsecureChat — Add E2EE instant messaging to Big Blue Button meetings

BigBlueButton is a video conferencing framework built on open source components. It is being used worldwide for education, events and training, and gained a lot of usage during the Covid-19 pandemic. Whilst audio and video are being handled by scalable components (notably Freeswitch and Kurento), the chat currently integrated in BBB is a single node.js thread for all conferences. This causes performance problems if used heavily in conferences, and lacks features such as E2EE and emoji support. In this project we will be trying to create an alternative chat service component based on mature open source solutions which have a richer feature set and offer end-to-end encryption. Some of the challenges are: respecting privacy in recordings, allowing chats 1:1 and in break-out rooms, automatic exchange of encryption keys, authentication, SingleSignOn and handling file exchange among chat users. We will be testing the enhanced chat with selected BBB users and will offer the result to the BBB developer and user community.

>> Read more about BBBsecureChat

Betrusted software — A minimalist and secure OS for embedded communication devices

The Betrusted software project utilizes the strongly typed Rust programming language to build the first applications and libraries for the open hardware Betrusted.io project. Betrusted is pioneering a new class of open hardware communications device, with a grant by NGI Zero. The project will set up a virtual environment for betrusted (e.g. QEMU / RISC-V) in order to develop and test software as close to target as possible and unlock community collaboration and contributions. The second main task in the project is to write a Matrix protocol command line client in order to analyze the memory characteristics in the highly constrained betrusted environment. The additional time is to be allocated to development support for the Bestrusted OS, develop glue layers and verify necessary interfaces for applications, provide unit/integration tests and develop (test) applications for it.

>> Read more about Betrusted software

Blink Qt Messaging — Add modern encryption to SIP softphone

Blink is a mature open source real-time communication application that can be used on different operating systems, based on the IETF SIP standard. It offers audio, video, instant messaging and desktop sharing. This project will extend its capability to support end-to-end asynchronous messaging and end-to-end encription that works both online (OTR) and offline (OpenPGP). Additional features to be developed include end-to-end delivery and read notifications, and a searchable history database.

>> Read more about Blink Qt Messaging

Blink RELOAD — Secure P2P real-time communications with RELOAD

REsource LOcation And Discovery specification (RELOAD) is a standard produced by the IETF standard to (as the name indicates) describe how people can search within a local network to discover other people and devices they can then exchange video and voice calls with, send messages etc. Why make every discovery depend on the availability of a global DNS system, if you are actually near each other...

Blink is a mature open source real-time communication application that can be used on different operating systems, based on the IETF SIP standard. It offers audio, video, instant messaging and desktop sharing. Blink RELOAD aims to implement RELOAD (RFC 7904) , which describes a peer-to-peer network that allows participants to discover each other and to communicate using the IETF SIP protocol. This offers an alternative discovery mechanism, one that does not rely on server infrastructure, in order to allow participants to connect with each other and communicate. In addition, the RELOAD specification describes means by which participants can store, publish and share information, in a way that is secure and fully under the control of the user, without a third party controlling the sharing process or the information being shared.

>> Read more about Blink RELOAD

Bonfire Search & Discovery — Improving search and discoverability in the Fediverse

Bonfire is a modular ecosystem for federated networks. The project creates interoperable toolkits that people can use to easily build their own apps to meet their specific needs. Users are then free to interact with multiple people and groups using these apps hosted on their own device, regardless of what federated software these other people use. Federated topics within the Bonfire ecosystem can consist of a hashtag, a category in a taxonomy, a location, etc. This enables users to find a topic they are interested in, see everything that was tagged with that (publicly or in their network), and follow it to receive any new tagged content. This will be interoperable with existing fediverse apps like Mastodon without requiring extra development on their end, and will create a decentralised graph of topics that can help relevant information flow from instance to instance.

All content on a Bonfire instance (including remote content coming in via follows or federated topics) will also be aggregated in a local search index with which the user can search their own data, information from people or groups they follow, as well as content from topics or locations they are interested in from around the fediverse. This search will happen locally on their device (which is a plus for privacy), with results appearing instantly while typing a query, and being able to filter the results (e.g., by object or activity type, hashtags, topics, or language). Every line of Bonfire’s code is available to be used or forked, in a collection of libraries that can be assembled and re-assembled to create all kinds of full-featured apps. One example is Bonfire's mutual aid extension where users can post and search for requests and offers across different instances according to topic and/or geographical location.

>> Read more about Bonfire Search & Discovery

Briar — A secure messaging app with offline capabilities

Briar is a secure messaging app designed for activists, journalists and civil society groups. Instead of using a central server, encrypted messages are synchronized directly between the users' devices, protecting users and their relationships from surveillance. This project will enable users of Briar to delete their private messages. Giving users control of what information their devices retain will allow them to practice defence in depth, managing their exposure if their devices are lost or compromised.

>> Read more about Briar

Briar Desktop — E2EE online and offline messaging and discussion

Briar Desktop is a client for the peer to peer messenger Briar that runs on the typical desktop operating systems Windows, macOS and Linux. With the emergence of multiple Linux-based operating systems for phones, it will also become possible to adapt it to run on operating systems such as Manjaro, PureOS and postmarketOS. A basic version of Briar Desktop has just been implemented and released to the public, but its features are still limited to one-to-one communication. The main goal of this project is to implement the additional group-oriented modes of communication that Briar's Android client supports: groups, forums and blogs. While the first iteration of development focused on Linux, publishing for macOS and Windows are going to be stabilized from experimental to production stage within this project. To keep up with the development of the Android client, support for the upcoming Mailbox feature is also going to be implemented.

>> Read more about Briar Desktop

Castopod — Podcasting in the fediverse

Castopod is an open-source podcast hosting solution for everyone, that can connect to the Fediverse through the W3C ActivityPub standard (Pixelfed, Mastodon, Pleroma…). Castopod is user friendly, and allows for easy discovery everywhere. Whether you are a beginner, an amateur or a professional, you will get everything you need: you can create, upload, publish, manage server subscriptions (WebSub embedded server). You can allow users to listen to your podcast directly, but just as easily connect to commercial directories (Apple, Google, Spotify…).

Take back control: interact with your audience on your platform (like, share, comment), the social network IS the podcast. In addition to supporting W3C ActivityPub, you can also export to proprietary social networks (Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Facebook). Castopod is easily hosted on any PHP/MySQL server: unzip it and you and other podcasters are ready to broadcast professionally.

>> Read more about Castopod

Castopod Mobile — Userfriendly mobile podcasting application

Castopod Mobile is a free and open-source mobile podcast player application (GPL v3). It is intended to be installed on your mobile phone (iOS, Google Android, /e/…). You can install it from F-Droid, from your usual app store or you may compile it yourself for your own needs. Castopod Mobile is a two-in-one application: a podcast player and a Fediverse client. It serves several purposes: to provide a mobile application that takes advantages of ActivityPub features for podcasts (the ones that Castopod Server provides for instance). Secondly, to reduce the complexity of the Fediverse ecosystem during onboarding: account creation currently prevents many users into joining the Fediverse because it is difficult to guess where to begin. And thirdly: to provide a podcast application template for communities who want to build and manage their ecosystem from beginning (with your own private Castopod Server) to end (with your own Castopod Mobile based application).

>> Read more about Castopod Mobile

Discover and move your coins by yourself — A safe way to explore and work with cryptocurrency forks

The numerous technologies behind cryptocurrencies are probably the most difficult to understand compared to any other networks, even for technical experts - and especially bitcoin based networks. Most users, even those familiar with the technology for years, have to rely on wallets or run/sync full nodes. Empirically we can see that they usually get lost at a certain point of time, especially when said wallets dictate the use of new "features", like bip39 and alike, multisig, segwit and bech32. Most users don't understand where their coins are and on what addresses, what is the format of these addresses and what are their seeds and what they need to unlock their coins. This situation pushes users to give their private keys to dubious services, resulting to the loss of all of their coins. The alternative is to let exchanges manage their coins, which removes their agency and puts them at risk. The goal of this project is to correct this situation allowing people to simply discover where are their coins and what are their addresses, whatever features are used. It will allow them to discover their addresses from one coin to another, rediscover their seed if they lost a part, sign/verify addresses ownership, discover public keys from private keys and create their hierarchical deterministic addresses. In fact, all the tools needed to discover and check what is related to their coins - and this for any bitcoin based network, in addition it allows them to create their transactions by themselves and send them to the networks, or just check them. The tool is a standalone secure open source webapp inside browsers that must be used offline, this is a browserification of a nodejs module that can be also used or modified for those that have the technical knowledge.

>> Read more about Discover and move your coins by yourself

Conversations — A secure mobile messaging client

Conversations is an Android client for the federated, provider independent network of instant messaging servers that use the Extensible messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). It aims to provide a feature set and a user experience that is on par with other well known messaging services. While Conversations is capable of sending end-to-end encrypted text messages, images, short videos and voice messages it currently lacks the ability to make voice and video calls. This project is about adding A/V call capabilities to Conversations in a manner that is compatible to other XMPP clients. To achieve compatibility Conversations will implement the Jingle protocol extensions including XEP 0353 (Jingle Message Initiation) for a smooth user experience across multiple devices.

>> Read more about Conversations

Privacy Infrastructure for Corteza Federations — Allow users to locate and browse their private data wherever

The project summary for this project is not yet available. Please come back soon!

>> Read more about Privacy Infrastructure for Corteza Federations

ArtistHub — Allow creative artists to gain visibility and build reputation on the web

The Artist Hub is a progressive web app developed by The Creative Passport MTU, that allows users - Music makers - to connect different data sources and display their feeds all in the same global wall arranged in chronological order. Music makers will be able to create a custom fan page on a self-hostable server where all their music and related content can be placed and shared with their fans.

The underlying architecture for subscribing to and receiving posts/updates from connected services will be built using ActivityPub. The idea behind this architecture is a free and open-source way for music makers to share their content without needing to post to a number of different websites and social media and for fans to have the freedom to choose their platform of choice for engaging with that content.

We will use ActivityPub to aggregate data from a number of platforms. This will enable us to offer support for video (using PeerTube), audio (using Funkwhale), images (using PixelFed) and text (using Mastodon).

>> Read more about ArtistHub

CryptPad Auth — Implement external identity mechanisms to E2EE collaborative editor

CryptPad is a real-time collaboration environment that encrypts all user-generated content in users' browsers, making it illegible to the host of the service. In this project we'll develop optional extensions to the platform to provide additional layers of protection for such data by pursuing two broad strategies in parallel. For the first, we'll take a top-down approach to security through integration with identity provider services like LDAP or SSO, allowing organizations to apply centrally managed access control policies. For the second, more bottom-up approach, we'll offer tighter control of user accounts through various secondary authentication methods like app-based TOTP or email "magic-links". These new features will provide more choices for the protection of data stored in CryptPad, while also making the platform more approachable for conventional organizations by leveraging their existing points of trusted infrastructure.

>> Read more about CryptPad Auth

CryptPad — Real-time collaboration with client-side encryption

Cryptpad is a secure and encrypted open source collaboration platform. The CryptPad teams project will fund the development of a number of group-focused features to Cryptpad. We'll improve our current implementation of encrypted shared folders to display the permissions possessed by team members for different documents. The capacity to remove a member from a group is difficult in an encrypted system, as the knowledge of encryption keys cannot be taken away once given. We'll implement key-rotation protocols, and develop encrypted mailboxes to facilitate the delivery of new keys to authorized members. The same mailbox system will enable the development of notifications, allowing users to request additional permissions for documents, to invite new members to a group or session, or to inform friends that a document has been updated. Teams organize in many ways, and with the technical components available we'll focus on interfaces which support different modes of coordination, whether the team is hierarchical or self-organizing. Overall, we hope to make it so that the most intuitive way to collaborate is also the most secure.

>> Read more about CryptPad

CryptPad for communities — Collaborative web editor with client-side encryption

CryptPad is a secure and encrypted open-source collaboration platform, that allows people to work together online on documents, spreadsheets and other types of documents. The amazing thing is that while the participants can work with these web applications as they would with any normal tool, the server has no way of telling what it is they are working on. Everything is encrypted on the device of the user, before it is sent to the server. The "CryptPad for communities" project will improve the experience of users adopting the platform for community management tasks. We'll spend time solving the issues most commonly reported by our users as obstacles to their broader adoption of the platform as an alternative to proprietary services. Document review is as important to many as collaborative editing, so we'll implement comment workflows that integrate our recently introduced social features into our text editors. Our Kanban and spreadsheet apps will both receive some crucial updates to better facilitate project management tasks without compromising on privacy. We'll develop extra access control features based on users' public keys for documents that require stricter protection than is currently offered. Those hosting their own CryptPad instance will benefit from new functionality for their admin panel as well as detailed documentation to make server management more accessible. Finally, we'll implement extra controls permitting admins to limit access to their instance by requiring invites for registration. Altogether we hope these tools will allow communities more determination when it comes to their data, their processes, and their ability to work together productively.

>> Read more about CryptPad for communities

Redash — Predictive text entry without a keyboard

Dasher is an alternative text entry system that searches for suggestions without the discrete input through a keyboard. The software is invaluable to people with disabilities who use it to type or speak and who can’t control a regular physical or on-screen keyboard. Dasher is instead driven by continuous gesture using a dynamic predictive display, a concept originally developed by the University of Cambridge Inference group.

The dasher project aims to help all individuals with disabilities who use similar assistive technology by developing a modular word and letter prediction engine that is allows for a range of language models to be used - and new ones be trialed out, including potentially integration with context sensitive search prediction provided by search engine providers. The new dasher will provide a fresh codebase matching the features that current users require - whilst improving on the user experience for new users. Thanks to a permissive open source software license anyone will be able to develop additional innovations on top of dasher, including commercial entities that produce bespoke systems. This will help increase the ability for employers to hire people that depend on this type of input mechanisms.

>> Read more about Redash

DeltaBot — Social discovery over mail-based chat

Why make humans be the only ones to search new content that is relevant to you, if bots can be made to do the same on your behalf? The DeltaBot project will research and develop decentralized, e2e-encrypting and socially trustworthy bots for Delta Chat (https://delta.chat). Bots will bridge with messaging platforms like IRC and Matrix, offer media archiving for its users and provide ActivityPub and RSS/Atom integration to allow users to discover new content. Our project is not only to provide well tested and documented Chat Bots in Python but also help others to write and deploy their own custom bots. Bots will perform e2e-encryption by default and we'll explore seamless ways to resist active MITM attacks.

>> Read more about DeltaBot

Dino — User-friendly and secure instant messaging

Dino is an open-source messaging application. It uses XMPP as an underlying protocol, which allows federated, provider-independent communication and offers a world-wide network of interconnected servers. Dino aims to be secure and privacy-friendly while at the same time offering a good user experience and a modern feature set. This project will add encrypted audio/video calling functionality between two or more parties. The implementation will rely on existing standards to interoperate with other XMPP applications.

>> Read more about Dino

Encoding for Robust Immutable Storage (ERIS) — Encrypted and content-addressable data blocks

The Encoding for Robust Immutable Storage (ERIS) is an encoding of content into a set of uniformly sized, encrypted and content-addressed blocks as well as a short identifier (a URN). The content can be reassembled from the encrypted blocks only with this identifier (the read capability). ERIS is a form of content-addressing. The identifier of some encoded content depends on the content itself and is independent of the physical location of where the content is stored (unlike content addressed by URLs). This enables content to be replicated and cached, making systems relying on the content more robust.

Unlike other forms of content-addressing (e.g. IPFS), ERIS encrypts content into uniformly sized blocks for storage and transport. This allows peers without access to the read capability to transport and cache content without being able to read the content. ERIS is defined independent of any specific protocol or application and decouples content from transport and storage layers.

The project will release version 1.0.0 after handling feedback from security audit, provide implementations in popular languages to facilitate wider usage (e.g. C library, JS library on NPM), perform a number of core integrations into various transport and storage layers (e.g. GNUNet, HTTP, CoAP, S3), and deliver Block Storage Management (quotas, garbage collection and synchronization for caching peers).

>> Read more about Encoding for Robust Immutable Storage (ERIS)

AEAP — Automated e-mail address porting to a new provider

There is no search for email addresses, like there was in the days long gone of the phone book. Once an old contact disappears (e.g. moves jobs, changes provider), even hough you may have exchanged many emails with that person you can not discover which new email address(es) go(es) with that old contact.

The Automated E-mail Address Porting project (AEAP) wants to allows you to find the new email addresses of these existing email contacts. The project will research and develop the porting of an e-mail address to a new provider. We will implement, document, user-test and release a porting mechanism for Delta Chat, a leading end-to-end encryption mail client. Users can decide they want to use a new provider by entering credentials for a new e-mail address. The outcome of the AEAP project will be Delta Chat Desktop, Android and iOS releases to all app stores, providing seamless porting of e-mail addresses. Changing an e-mail provider will not depend on the consent of the existing one. GMail and various other "free e-mail" provider lock-in strategies will be weakened, also through the e2e-encryption that our AEAP effort spearheads.

>> Read more about AEAP

Thunderbird - native EteSync integration — Add encrypted sync to Thunderbird

EteSync is a secure, end-to-end encrypted and privacy respecting sync solution for contacts, calendars and tasks. It protects user data by encrypting it and decrypting it on the end user device, meaning that the user does not have to trust the service provider. Etesync is being developed with support of NGI Zero. This project is adding native sync support for EteSync to the popular Thunderbird mail client (via the existing TbSync which is about to be integrated into Thunderbird) in order to drastically lower the entry threshold. This will allow even non skilled users to fully protect their data with end-to-end encryption. Setup will just involve (auto-)installing an add-on and entering credentials, and selecting which resources should be synchronized.

>> Read more about Thunderbird - native EteSync integration

FairSync — Simplify aggregation and discovery of places and events

How can we make it possible to search across different maps and lists of events maintained by different organisations? By connecting them, of course! FairSync develops and collects best practices to synchronize maps and events and to federate messengers and identities active in the global movement for sustainability. System integrators are faced with fast evolving APIs and protocols when they try to discover and connect systems and make search more easy.

We will work on master-master replication frameworks of metadata enriched data sets and test with platform providers for sustainability affairs. One approach is the "lazy master scheme": a common update propagation strategy where changes on a primary copy are first committed at the master node, afterwards the secondary copy is updated in a separate transaction at slave nodes.

We will try to advance such immediate update propagation in this project using protocols such as ActivityPub or the InCommon API. Federation of identities will be managed with SAML or oAuth2 protocols with fairlogin as a common identity provider.

>> Read more about FairSync

Federated Timesheets — Interoperable machine-readable time tracking

This project brings together developers from WikiSuite, m-ld.io, Muze and Ponder Source in a collaboration to deliberately research how federated machine-readable data can work between independent software projects on the user-operated internet. We want to showcase how our vision of Federated Bookkeeping can make internet users "connected but sovereign".

Each project’s timesheet system that tracks billable hours will be extended with time tracker apps (locally or on a self-hosted server) to expose machine-readable timesheet data through a query endpoint (reader pull) or through a webhook (writer push).

Furthermore a W3C interest group “federated timesheets” was started that will contain and maintain a repository of time tracker schemas and extend this continuously in an orderly fashion to enable developers to import recipients’ schemas as well as add their own to the repository.

>> Read more about Federated Timesheets

ForgeFed — Federation for software collaboration tools

When you are searching for new software to use, you will have to visit many different software forges - like Gitlab, Codeberg or Sourcehut. There isn't really a tool to search for anything across the boundaries of these different software forges.

ForgeFed aims to define a vocabulary and a protocol for decentralized communication and federation of websites used for hosting and collaboration on version control repositories, issue tracking and project management. Typical such websites are code forges such as GitLab and Gitea instances (and centralized services like github), but the idea also applies to applications like collaborative civic planning, publishing of creative writing (such as prose and poetry) and more. ForgeFed is to be designed as an extension of ActivityPub, and web apps implementing it would be joining the Fediverse. The world of repo and project hosting would switch from the centralized model of github (and the lonely disconnected websites running GitLab or Gitea etc.) into a network of federating websites, creating a global decentralized community. The project will publish a set of specifications and guides for implementing the federation protocol, and to work with existing projects and communities to refine and finalize the specifications and implement ForgeFed federation.

>> Read more about ForgeFed

Fractal — Native client for the Matrix protocol

Fractal is an Open Source (GPLv3) Matrix client written in Rust. It uses the GTK graphical interface toolkit and is part of the GNOME project. It was created with a big focus on usability and interface design. The objective of this project is to add end-to-end encryption support to Fractal. Fractal has two major parts: A backend part, which communicates with the Matrix server, and a part that contains the GUI and data handling. This will be achieved by first replacing the current backend with the matrix-rust-sdk that was created recently and has several advantages to the current backend, including an abstraction for handling end-to-end encryption for Matrix. Once the backend pieces are in place, Fractal's UI needs to be updated to allow users to actually use end-to-end encryption, which involves a number of non-trivial new user flows (e.g. device verification, cross-signing, key backup).

>> Read more about Fractal

Funkwhale — ActivityPub-driven audio streaming and sharing

Funkwhale is a free, decentralized and open-source audio streaming and sharing platform, built on top of the ActivityPub protocol. It enables users to create communities of interest around music and audio content in general, listen to their private music library or distribute their own productions on the network. Each Funkwhale pod, or server, can communicate with other pods to exchange audio content, metadata or for user interactions. In this project, Funkwhale will improve the publication experience for creators, release its first stable version, improve content discovery inside the platform through better sharing and search mechanisms. We will also continue research and development for Retribute, a community wealth sharing platform meant to support creators on Funkwhale or any other platform.

>> Read more about Funkwhale

GNU social — Modernizing the original FOSS Social Network

GNU social is a free social networking platform, easily self-hostable and highly accessible, that enables both private and public decentralized communications. With NLnet NGI Zero's support, the project is undergoing a change of main focus from microblogging to groups and tags. With this, GNU social will be a space for communities where users can express their passions and explore new ones. Users will be able to immerse themselves in easily filterable content relevant to their interests, and to create and join communities. It's hard to pinpoint an existing alternative service that promotes the same level of functionality in terms of tagging, filtering and connecting with people that share common interests. Especially considering the available degree of accessibility, customization and expansion via plugins.

>> Read more about GNU social

GNU Taler — Advanced electronic payment system for privacy-preserving payments

GNU Taler is an advanced electronic payment system for privacy-preserving payments. Unusual for such a system, the entire Taler system is ethical, free/libre software, so there are no dependencies on third parties and no black boxes. Taler can support digital payments in any currency - existing or new, mainstream or private. Unique to the GNU Taler system is that it provides anonymity for customers, while delivering various anti-fraud measures necessary to curb abuse.

If you are a central bank, you can use Taler to provision a CBDC. If you are a regular bank or payment provider, you can use it as a mature digital payment method instead of various proprietary solutions which are opaque and come with many restrictions and high costs. The technology behind Taler fully supports local or community currencies too. Taler was designed to meet all the usual regulations for electronic money issuers, and supports regulations like PCI-DSS and GDPR out of the box. The work done within this grant delivered a key regulatory requirement, an independent audit of the payment service operator (the "exchange"). With the third party security audit of the GNU Taler codebase completed, banks and payment providers can now switch to this new system with confidence. GNU Taler finally brings us a transparent, trustworthy and truly private payment ecosystem that operates independent from vendors.

>> Read more about GNU Taler

GNUnet Messenger API — API for decentralized instant messaging using CADET

Communication is one of the most valuable goods, but it requires confidentiality, integrity and availability to trust it. The GNUnet Messenger API implements an encrypted translation layer based on Confidential Ad-hoc Decentralized End-to-End Transport (CADET). Through CADET the API will allow any kind of application to set up a fully decentralized form of secure and private communication between groups of users. The service uses e2e-encryption and does not require any personal information from you to be used.

You are able to send text messages, share files, invite contacts to a group or delete prior messages with a custom delay. Messages and files will both be stored decentralized being only available for others in the group. GNUnet provides the possibility to use this service without relying on the typical internet structures, with a turnkey optional DHT for sharing resources.

Unlike many other messengers out there the GNUnet Messenger service focuses on privacy. You decide who can contact you and who does not. You decide which information gets shared with others and which stays a secret. The whole service and its API is free and open by design to be used by many different applications without trusting any third party.

>> Read more about GNUnet Messenger API

GPG Lacre project — Best effort encryption of mail flows with OpenPGP

This project is the continuation of the work on providing open source, GnuPG based email encryption for emails at rest. All incoming emails are automatically encrypted with user's public key before they are saved on the server. It is a server side encryption solution while the control of the encryption keys are fully at the hands of the end-user and private keys are never stored on the server.

The scope of the project is to improve on the already existing code, provide easy to use key upload system (standalone as well as Roundcube plugin) and key discoverability. Beside providing a solution that is easy to use we will also provide easy to digest material about encryption, how it works and how to make use of it in situations other the just mailbox encryption. Understanding how encryption works is the key to self-determination and is therefore an important part of the project.

GPG Mailgate will be battle tested on the email infrastructure of Disroot.org (an ethical non-profit service provider).

>> Read more about GPG Lacre project

Gosling — Generic Onions Services Library Project

One of the internet’s core infrastructural flaws is a lack of anonymity - yet anonymity is a form of privacy that many users would prefer to have. Building products which preserve this user privacy while also being featureful and easy to use is difficult. Part of this difficulty has to do with the fact that developers need to be aware of and actively counter the myriad ways users can be de-anonymised (e.g. fingerprinting, side-channels). This requires knowing many intricate details at all levels of the software stack.Project parent Blueprint for Free Speech's goal is to gradually increase the portion of the internet that offers anonymity. By creating a “generic onions services library” (Gosling), we can help developers create secure and anonymous p2p applications without having to delve too deeply into protocol design or the Tor spec, and to do so with more security assurance.

>> Read more about Gosling

Haketilo/Hydrilla — Browser extension for site customisatoin

Internauts today have very little control over their web browsing. Many sites are no longer simple documents meant for reading but complex in-browser applications often equipped with facilities to mistreat their users. Haketilo is a browser extension that aims to change this by giving you complete control over the resources your browser loads for websites, starting with JavaScript. One of its features is the ability to replace sites' javascript programs with user-supplied ones. There is currently no other browser extension that provides users with a secure and fully free browsing experience of this kind. Haketilo works together with its repository, Hydrilla, which it can query for community-developed custom site resources. Both tools are available as free/libre software under GNU licenses. In addition, the Hydrilla API can also be utilized by independent developers who want to increase the amount of user agency in their products. For greater website compatibility, Haketilo will work alongside other browser extensions that mitigate harmful JS.

>> Read more about Haketilo/Hydrilla

Hubzilla — Federated social networking environment

Hubzilla is one of the most mature stacks within the so called Fediverse, and is able to run different protocols such as ActivitPub, Diaspora and Zot. Hubzilla provides powerful tools for communities and individuals to help organise themselves, while providing a possibility to interact with each other. It is a decentralised identity, communications and permissions framework built, using common webserver technology. The software features many useful apps to enable discussions, event organisation, file sharing etc. with built-in internet-wide access control. With Hubzilla you don't have an account on a server, you own an identity that you can take with you across the network.

With the help of the NGI Zero grant, the new version of the zot protocol (zot6) will be implemented as the primary communication protocol and the UX/UI will be improved to lower the entry barrier for less experienced computer users. And of course you can easily search your Hubzilla server for topics, users, fora and tags.

>> Read more about Hubzilla

Indigenous — Indieweb mobile clients

Indigenous is a collection of native, web and desktop applications which allows you to engage with the Internet as you do on social media sites, but posts it all on your website. Use the built-in reader to read and respond to posts across the internet. Indigenous doesn't track or store any of your information, instead you choose a service you trust or host it yourself. Posts are collected on your website or service which supports W3C Microsub, writing posts uses the W3C Micropub specification. Popular services that support both are Wordpress, Micro.blog and Drupal, with more coming soon.

>> Read more about Indigenous

Inventaire — Wikidata-based social sharing of reading experiences

The Inventaire Project is an effort to move forward on the front of accessing information on resources using libre software powered by open knowledge. This ideal is being materialized in the form of inventaire.io, a libre book sharing webapp, inviting everyone to make the inventory of their physical books, declare what they want to do with it (giving, sharing, selling), as well as who should be able to see it (shared publicly through e.g. ActivityPub, or only visible by your friends and groups).

To power those inventories with structured bibliographic data, inventaire.io is also playing the role of a Wikidata-federated open and contributive bibliographic database, extending wikidata.org data with Wikidata-compatible entities (CC0, shared data schema) tailored to our needs, but ready to be pushed to Wikidata when the data contributor deems it appropriate. This linked open data architecture allows users to build their inventories on a huge open knowledge graph, that we believe will, in time, offer exceptional discovery capabilities. This project addresses many features, such as improved privacy settings, accessibility, creating publisher collections and data federation.

>> Read more about Inventaire

End-To-End Encryption for Jitsi Meet — Proven strong encryption for open source video conferencing

Jitsi Meet is an open-source video conferencing application that uses Jitsi Videobridge to provide high quality, secure and scalable video conferences. Traditionally, it used hop-by-hop encryption to secure the contents. The drawback of this is of course that the videobridge is able to view the unencrypted contents. With the advent of the WebRTC Insertable Streams API in Chrome it became possible to implement actual end-to-end encryption on top of WebRTC. This project will implement and verify a more complete solution that involve a key management system which establishes public keys, derives encryption keys and changes them depending on the state of the conference.

>> Read more about End-To-End Encryption for Jitsi Meet

Kaidan — Adding encryption to userfriendly cross-platform XMPP client

Kaidan is a user-friendly and modern chat app for every device. It uses the open communication protocol XMPP (Jabber). Unlike other chat apps, you are not dependent on one specific service provider. Instead, you can choose between various servers and clients. Kaidan is one of those XMPP clients. In contrast to many other XMPP clients, it is easy to get started and switch devices with Kaidan. Additionally, it adapts to your operating system and device's dimensions. It runs on mobile and desktop systems including Linux, Windows, macOS, Android, Plasma Mobile and Ubuntu Touch. The user interface makes use of Kirigami and QtQuick. The back- end of Kaidan is entirely written in C++ using Qt and the Qt-based XMPP library QXmpp.

>> Read more about Kaidan

Katzen — Meta-data resistant instant messaging over the Katzenpost mixnet

Katzen is a new private instant messaging application built using the Katzenpost mixnet project, which is an overlay network that is able to hide communication patterns of individual users from passive network observers. This means that attackers cannot link sending and receiving of messages on the network with any of the participants. Messages between conversation parties are delivered to and read from message queues operated by the mixnet service operators. The legacy simple design maintains a per client queue and is able to see when a client is receiving a message, how often clients receive messages, and when the client is online and checking for their messages. The purpose of this project is to replace the legacy ephemeral message storage system used by Katzen with a replacement that does not link messages with a specific user or conversation, To do this, clients will include a csprng seed as part of the contact creation process that will be used to generate a deterministic sequence of message identifiers between conversation participants; these identifiers will be used by each client to query the ephemeral storage provider for the next message in the conversation. Because polling the storage service adds latency, and this design must check for new messages from each conversation partner, mechanisms to reduce the number of round trips - such as using SURBs as an asynchronous callback upon message delivery on the storage provider will be explored as a means to build a mixnet 'push' service to decrease the total round trip delay in receiving a new message.

>> Read more about Katzen

Kiwi IRC — Self-hosted web IRC environment

Kiwi IRC is an open messaging platform that any online organisation or community can use. We do not believe that any community should be locked into a single vendor for their communication tools as this restricts how the community grows and develops - the community itself should dictate how they develop over time. Working with other open source projects in the IRC world, we are expanding the generally available privacy tools and making them usable for mainstream use. This will see tools such as end-to-end encryption and mobile applications being brought to users taking advantage of open messaging, improving the privacy of millions of existing IRC users and pushing for open platforms.

>> Read more about Kiwi IRC

Improve Email Encryption in KMail — Adopt improvements in Email Encryption in KMail

The goal of this project is to make it more simple for inexperienced users to just use encrypted mails, at the click of a button. Autocrypt is a new method for email encryption, that needs nearly no user interaction. It performs the needed key exchange transparently in the background, and does key management automatically. Encrypted Headers is a protocol to send mail headers in the encrypted mail part. Traditional encryption methods leaked meta-data, which could be used for mass surveillance purposes. The result will be part of the KDEPIM codebase, so you don't have to install anything else than KMail to use these improvements.

>> Read more about Improve Email Encryption in KMail

Collabora Online and LibreOffice — Improved visual document search for cloud service

Today it’s usually easier to use a search engine for information than find it locally, which is not optimal from a digital sovereignty point of view. Part of the problem is that we lack good open source tools to provide context and graphical search of local documents. These tools present plain-text lists for search results, which means people with good graphical memory find information slower. We think it’s a huge opportunity to show the context of search hits in a graphical form to find information faster. Technically, this will mean taking an existing file synchronization and sharing (FSS) solution, hosting your documents on-site. Then improving LibreOffice to index content in documents with their context. We will build a secure REST API on top of this in Collabora Online which provides good performance. Finally we will integrate with a search engine, e.g. Apache Solr to create a proof-of-concept search page that allows searching in all documents hosted in a FSS solution. This will serve as an example how to integrate our solution to other projects like Nextcloud.

>> Read more about Collabora Online and LibreOffice

lemmur — A Lemmy mobile client

Lemmur is a multi-platform client for Lemmy - a federated link aggregator. It aims to bring the fediverse to the hands of regular people by providing a seamless experience across different instances. Currently lemmur implements the majority of functionalities provided by Lemmy making it competitive with existing social media apps. In this project lemmur will expand to support more Quality of Life features such as live comment updates and notifications with websockets, caching, theming system, and custom feeds. Additionally lemmur will expand its and Lemmy's reach by internationalizing the whole app, creating adaptive UI for different platforms, and creating an onboarding experience that will work as an introduction to both lemmur and the fediverse. Lastly lemmur will continue improving the seamless instance experience reducing the need of changing instances to the minimum.

>> Read more about lemmur

Lemmy — ActivityPub for link aggregation

Lemmy is an open-source, easily self-hostable link aggregator that you can use to share and discover interesting new ideas - and discuss them with the world. Its designed to work in the Fediverse, and communicate natively with other ActivityPub services, such as Mastodon, Funkwhale and Peertube.

Lemmy aim to create a decentralized alternative to widely used proprietary services like Reddit. For a link aggregator, this means a user registered on one server can subscribe to communities on any other server, and have discussions with users registered elsewhere. The front page of popular link aggregators is where many people get their daily news, so Lemmy has the potential to help alter the social media landscape.

>> Read more about Lemmy

Lemmy Federation — Lemmy Federation and ActivityPub compliance

Lemmy is an open-source, easily self-hostable link aggregator that you can use to share and discover interesting new ideas - and discuss them with the world. Its designed to work in the Fediverse, and communicate natively with other ActivityPub services, such as Mastodon, Funkwhale and Peertube.

Lemmy aim to create a decentralized alternative to widely used proprietary services like Reddit. For a link aggregator, this means a user registered on one server can subscribe to communities on any other server, and have discussions with users registered elsewhere. The front page of popular link aggregators is where many people get their daily news, so Lemmy has the potential to help alter the social media landscape. In this project, the team focuses on standards compliance, interoperability, internationalisation features, private communities and improving moderation.

>> Read more about Lemmy Federation

LiberaForms — End tot End Encrypted Forms

Cloud services that offer handling of online forms are widely used by schools, associations, volunteer organisations, civil society, and even families to publish questionnaires and collect the results. While these cloud services (such as Google Forms and Microsoft Forms) can be quite convenient to create forms with, for the constituency which has to fill out these forms such practices can actually be very invasive because forms may not only include personal details such as their name, address, gender or age, but also more intimate questions including medical details, political information and life style background. In many situations there is a power asymmetry between the people creating the form and the users that have to supply the data through that form. Often there is significant time pressure. No wonder that users feel socially coerced to comply and hand over their data, even though they might be perfectly aware that their own data might be used against them.

LiberaForms is a transparent alternative for proprietary online forms that you can easily host yourself. In this project, LIberaForms will add end-to-end encryption with OpenPGP, meaning that the data is encrypted on the client device and only the final recipient of the form data can read it (and not just anyone with access to a server). Also, the team will add real-time collaboration on forms, in case users need to fill out forms together.

>> Read more about LiberaForms

Liberaforms — Open source form server

Cloud services that offer handling of online forms are widely used, for questionnaires but also for gathering data within schools, associations, volunteer organisations, civil society and even families. While these cloud services (such as Google Forms and Microsoft Forms) can be quite convenient to create forms with, for the constituency which has to fill out these forms such practices can actually be very invasive to their privacy - as many forms not only include personal details such as their name, address, gender or age, but also a lot more intimate questions - up to medical details, political information and life style background. In many situations there is a power asymmetry between the people creating the form and the users that have to supply the data through that form. Often there is significant time pressure. No wonder that users feel socially coerced to comply and hand over their data, even though they might be perfectly aware that their own data might be used against them.

This project will produce a free and libre software solution to create online forms, and to manage the outcomes. The goal is to make something for regular humans: user-friendly, non-intrusive and light-weight. The project aims to make self-hosted form management easy even for novice users, so data can be kept safely on-premise or with a hosting company you can trust. Something that can be used by our neighbours, friends, colleagues and anyone else who respects privacy and understands the moral obligation of the creator of a form to protect the privacy of the people that are supposed to share data with them.

>> Read more about Liberaforms

XMPP-ActivityPub gateway — XMPP, ActivityPub and E2EE Pubsub

XMPP (aka Jabber) is the vendor-netural internet standard for instant messaging. ActivityPub is a web standard for federated social networking, used in software like Mastodon, Pleroma, PeerTube, Pixelfed and Funkwhale. The project consists of two components: an ActivityPub-XMPP gateway, which will be a component bridging these protocols - enabling ActivityPub users to access XMPP blogs, comments and other features, and vice versa. And adding state of the art end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for PubSub and filesharing, which entails proposing a new XMPP standard which can provide a secure way to publish, retrieve and subscribe to all sorts of data over XMPP.

The project is built on Libervia (previously known as "Salut à Toi"), a communication ecosystem based on XMPP. Libervia offers several interfaces (web, desktop, mobile, command line, text UI) and explores the XMPP protocol beyond instant messaging. Libervia features chat, blogging, file sharing, photo albums, events, forums, etc. Libervia's goal is to develop an all-in-one, easy to use "familial and personal social network", i.e. a tool to communicate with the people close to you securely - and that lets your personal data stay within your control (as it should be).

>> Read more about XMPP-ActivityPub gateway

Librecast — E2E encrypted multicast

The Librecast project contributes to decentralising the Internet by enabling multicast. It builds transitional protocols and software to extend the reach of multicast and enable easy deployment by software developers. This can for instance help to synchronise large evolving datasets to many users at the same time (even hundreds of gigabytes of blockchain data) in an economic, reliable, transparent and fair way - unlike with unicast, everyone can get a copy of the same packets received by everyone else. Not depending on a centralised structure (anyone can be the upstream source), means it is very robust as well. LibreCast is energy efficient and as a next generation internet technology offers confidentiality and security - and is sustainable, has high scalability and throughput.

Librecast Live is a Multicast Live Streaming, Conferencing and Remote Collaborative Work Environment. It is a versatile multicast platform flexible and scalable enough to be used for live-streaming, classrooms and conferences - using an ad hoc or previously established web of trust. While using multicast helps solve the scalability inherent with this kind of setup, actually all messages are transmitted over encrypted channels - providing strong privacy and integrity assurances through E2E encryption.

>> Read more about Librecast

LibreOffice P2P — Encrypted collaborative editing in the browser

LibreOffice Online is the online version of the popular open source office application, and a leading implementation of the ISO/IEC 26300 OpenDocument Format standard. During the project this free software application will be modified so it can run fully client-side inside a regular browser - meaning you can view and edit office documents without an install required. This provides the technical foundations to support true P2P editing of complex office documents. The ability to remove the entire dependency on a server means that document collaboration is moving towards zero-knowledge implementations – where no single-point of architectural failure exists and no data is required to sit unencrypted on a non-user owned (or trusted) server instance. The improved LibreOffice Online will be able to provide end-to-end encryption – both for the peer2peer use case, as well as securely keeping documents encrypted when at rest. That means data is safe when the user is disconnected, whether it is stored on an untrusted server or in the local Web storage.

>> Read more about LibreOffice P2P

Lightmeter — Email server configuration lifecycle management

Lightmeter will make it easy to run email servers large and small by visualising, monitoring, and notifying users of problems and opportunities for improved performance and security. People will regain control of sensitive communications either directly by running their own mailservers, or indirectly via the increased diversity and trustworthiness of mail hosting services.

>> Read more about Lightmeter

Lizard — E2E Rendez-vous and discovery

The Lizard project aims to develop a common protocol for end-to-end encrypted social applications using Tor as underlying transport mechanism, with the addition of store-and-forward servers discovered through the Tor hidden service directory. The protocol takes care of confidentiality and anonymity concerns, and adds mechanisms for easily synchronising application-level state on top. All communications are done "off the grid" using Tor, but identities can be publicly attested to using existing social media profiles. Using a small marker in your social profiles, you can signal to other Lizard users that they can transparently message you over Lizard instead. By taking care of these common discovery and privacy concerns in one easy-to-use software suite, we hope that more applications will opt for end-to-end encryption by default without compromising on anonymity.

>> Read more about Lizard

Mailpile Search Integration — Personal email search engine

Mailpile is an e-mail client and personal e-mail search engine, with a strong focus on user autonomy and privacy. This project, "Mailpile Search Integration", will adapt and enhance Mailpile so other applications can make use of Mailpile's built-in search engine and e-mail store. This requires improving Mailpile in three important ways: First, the project will add fine-grained access control, so the user can control which data is and isn't exposed. Second, enabling remote access will be facilitated, allowing a Mailpile running on a personal device to communicate with applications elsewhere on the network (such as smartphones, or services in "the cloud"). And finally, the interoperability functions themselves (the APIs) need to be defined (building on existing standards wherever possible), implemented and documented.

>> Read more about Mailpile Search Integration

Manyverse — An off-line capable privacy-centric social messaging app

Manyverse is a social networking mobile app, implemented not as a typical cloud service, but instead on a peer-to-peer network: Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB). The mobile app locally hosts the user's database, allowing them to own their personal data, and also use the app when offline. Data can sync from one mobile device to another, via Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or Internet. Free and open source software.

>> Read more about Manyverse

Manyverse Private Groups — Implement SSB Private Groups in Manyverse

Manyverse is a peer-to-peer social network built on the SSB protocol where users themselves are responsible for the network. It is used by thousands of people, on both mobile and desktop. Users can share public posts with each other, but there is currently no way to write private messages to closed communities of a dozen members or more. With this project, we want to implement and improve SSB Private Groups for adoption in Manyverse. This is a cryptographic mechanism to ensure that communities can talk in private. Additionally, we want to make sure that these communities have the tools they need to moderate and prune their social space for safety.

>> Read more about Manyverse Private Groups

Mastodon - groups, filtering, moderation — Group support with ActivityPub

Mastodon is a decentralized open-source social network built on the ActivityPub protocol. It allows users to launch their own instances of social networks, while allowing the instances to connect over the Fediverse. The project foresees the development of groups, advanced filtering, and improved moderation functionality. Groups functionality gives users the option to communicate with a smaller subset of their connections; improved moderation functionality will give admins a toolkit to efficiently deal with reported cases, e.g. with batch actions; advanced filtering adds more sophisticated ways to filter posts.

>> Read more about Mastodon - groups, filtering, moderation

MeiliSearch — Modern and responsive search

Advanced content search for apps and websites has become an increasingly protected craft. When owners of big content repositories need search at scale, they have to choose between hiring expensive search specialists or outsourcing search in its entirety. Search doesn’t need to be this complicated. It should be simple enough to be self-hosted with the developers you already have, and it should be understandable & open enough that you can resort to a managed cloud without fear of lock-in.

MeiliSearch is blazing fast and very light on resources. It packs advanced search capabilities like search-as-you-type, relevancy , typo-tolerance, synonyms and filters, all set up and configured in minutes. Our primary path to widespread adoption is integration with other developer ecosystems. Every new language, framework, platform or application that’s supported brings in a new audience of developers that wouldn’t otherwise know we even exist.

>> Read more about MeiliSearch

Misskey — Misskey federation and ActivityPub compliance

Misskey is a decentralized and open source microblogging platform.It has "Reactions" that allow you to easily express your feeling, "Drive" that allow you to manage files in one place, and a highly customizable UI that makes it more fun to share something.Misskey also implements ActivityPub, so it can communicate with other platforms interactively. Since the code is open to the public, users can also create their own instances and create their own communities. Because Misskey uses Node.js, a non-blocking IO, performance remains lightweight even when federating with many instances.From the very beginning of its development, Misskey has been focused on being the first to incorporate the latest technologies of the web to provide an unique experience.

>> Read more about Misskey

Mobilizon — Find, create and organize events

Mobilizon is a free, libre and federated groups and events management platform. Most proprietary social medias collect behavioral data and social graphs by hosting groups and events management tools (such as Facebook events, MeetUp, etc.). This can become a problem, even more when your group works on topics like activism, raising awareness and empowering citizens. Mobilizon allows for a federation of interconnected hosts, that decentralize by design data concentration while permitting interactions between users across the federation. This group and event management tool has been designed by asking and considering the needs of mobilized citizens. It includes features that has been since implemented as well by mainstream social medias (multiple profiles for each account), and does not reproduces mechanisms driven by the attention economy. As such, Mobilizon is not a social media, it does not pander to egos, but focuseson being a toolkit tomanagecommunities. On top of the eventpublishingtool, it features a group discussion tool (akin to a minimalist forum), a group page management tool (that can be used as a one-page website), a group public and private posts tool (similar to a blog), and a group link directory (to organize links to online documents, resources, etc.). With this grant, Framasoft aims to improve Mobilizon's search results (within an instance as well as throughout the federation) and recommendations. We also want to help people find groups and events close to their interests or their location, as well as allow them to import their events from other platforms when possible (Facebook, MeetUp, etc.).

>> Read more about Mobilizon

MoboSearch — Providing an alternative view on the Android App ecosystem

Mobile phones play a major role in our society, yet they still suffer from severe limitations in how they handle apps. As a result, most people are unaware of the dangers of privacy leaks and are typically offered very constrained search capabilities within one single source of information, the app store. MoboSearch is a new search engine and information portal for apps, empowering users beyond the existing app stores. The system exposes privacy and security information, like app permissions, and gives users new easy and flexible search capabilities that allow to make an informed choice and to increase people's awareness. Openness and interoperability ensure that the system can offer and receive data, so to cooperatively enable a better and healthier app ecosystem.

>> Read more about MoboSearch

Monal IM — Free Jabber/XMPP client for iOS and macOS

Monal is a open source XMPP instant messaging client for MacOS and iOS which strives to be the go-to client for these platforms just like the app Conversations is for Android. XMPP in general is an open and standardized protocol for real time communication. Anyone can host their own server and communicate freely with each other, just like with email and just like email the used addresses are of the form "user@domain.tld". In this project, Monal will among others add end-to-end encryption to its chat interface, in this case the OMEMO XEP which uses a so call double ratchet mechanism to provide strong protection of the confidentiality of messages.Within the project, the team will also implement various other XEPs such as audio and Video (A/V calls), adding modern functionality and improving interoperability with other clients.

>> Read more about Monal IM

Movim — Add OMEMO encryption to Movim XMPP client

Movim is a web platform that delivers social and IM features on top of the mature XMPP standard (aka Jabber). Unlike other chat apps, with XMPP you have a choice of both servers and clients - and the ability to add any features you want, and restrict your trust to those that deserve it. Movim is a user-friendly communication platform aimed at small and medium structures (up to a hundred simultaneous users), and sports a number of unique social features beyond instant messaging. And because it sits on XMPP, Movim users can explore the whole global instant messaging network from a single account.

In this project, Movim will add end-to-end encryption to its chat interface, in this case the OMEMO XEP. Since Movim is browser based, the implementation will be have to put the encryption layer client-side - or in other words, inside the browser. Because users can connect simultaneously on the same XMPP account using different browsers with Movim, each browsers will be seen as a different "device". Decrypted messages will be saved in a browser database, using IndexedDB. The web server will just take care of handling public keys to the XMPP network and store the encrypted messages, same as the user's XMPP server does when using archiving methods. The project will deal with both the one-to-one chat implementation and the Multi-User Chat part of Movim. This is part of a concerted effort to create reliable end-to-end encryption for XMPP based real time communications. At present growth of the wider network is hampered by lack of interoperability.

>> Read more about Movim

Mynij — Portable indexing and search engine for mobile

People feel lost when their connection to the internet is cut. All of a sudden, they cannot search for some reference or quickly look up something online. At the other end, hundreds of millions of servers are 'always on', awaiting the user to come online. Of course, this is neither very resilient nor economic. And it is also not necessary. In the 60s, computers used to occupy a large room. Nowadays, with smartphones, they fit in your hand. A complete copy of the Web (10 PB) already fits on 100 SSDs of 100 TB occupying a volume similar to an original IBM PC. A partial copy of the Web optimised for a single person will thus soon fit on a smartphone.

Mynij believes that Web search will eventually run offline for legal, technical and economic rationale. This is why it is building a general purpose Web search engine that runs offline and fits into a smartphone. It can provide fast results with better accuracy than online search engines. It protects privacy and freedom of expression against recent forms of digital censorship. It reduces the cost of online advertising for small businesses. It brings search algorithms and information presentation under end-user control. And you control its availability: as long as you have a copy and a working device, it can work.

>> Read more about Mynij

NeoChat — Native Matrix encrypted instant messaging client

NeoChat is a client for Matrix, an open and decentralized chat protocol. NeoChat is using Qt and KDE technologies to run on many platforms: Linux, Windows, macOS, Plasma Mobile and Android. One of the biggest missing features for NeoChat is support for end-to-end encryption. Currently, all the messages are sent unencrypted and encrypted conversation can't be read in NeoChat. This is not a problem for public rooms since they are usually not encrypted, but it makes NeoChat unsuitable for usage in a private or professional context. The goal of this project is to enable support for encryption in NeoChat. Since NeoChat uses libQuotient, a client library for the matrix protocol, most of the work will take place in libQuotient. This means that the work done in the project will also help other Matrix clients and bots built with Quotient, in particular Spectral and Quaternion.

>> Read more about NeoChat

Nextcloud — Unified and intelligent search within private cloud data

The internet helps people to work, manage, share and access information and documents. Proprietary cloud services from large vendors like Microsoft, Google, Dropbox and others cannot offer the privacy and security guarantees users need. Nextcloud is a 100% open source solution where all information can stay on premise, with the protected users choose themselves. The Nextcloud Search project will solve the last remaining open issue which is unified, convenient and intelligent search and discoverability of data. The goal is to build a powerful but user friendly user interface for search across the entire private cloud. It will be possible to select data date, type, owner, size, keywords, tags and other metadata. The backend will offers indexing and searching of file based content, as well as integrated search for other contents like text chats, calendar entries, contacts, comments and other data. It will integrate with the private search capabilities of Searx. As a result the users will have the same powerful search functionalities they know and like elsewhere, but respecting the privacy of users and strict regulations like the GDPR.

>> Read more about Nextcloud

Adopting the Noise Key Exchange in Tox — Improved security of Tox instant messaging with NoiseIK

Tox is a P2P instant messaging protocol that aims to provide secure messaging. It's implemented in a FOSS library called "c-toxcore" (GPLv3). The project started in the wake of Edward Snowden's disclosure of global surveillance. It's intended as an end-to-end encrypted and distributed Skype replacement. The cryptographic primitives for the key exchange (X25519), authentication (Poly1305) and symmetric encryption (XSalsa20) are state of the art peer-reviewed algorithms. Tox' authenticated key exchange (AKE) during Tox' handshake works, but it is a self-made cryptographic protocol and is known to be vulnerable to key compromise impersonation (KCI) attacks. This vulnerability enables an attacker, who compromised the static long-term private X25519 key of a Tox party Alice, to impersonate any other Tox party (with certain limitations) to Alice (reverse impersonation) and to perform Man-in-the-Middle attacks. The objective of this project is to implement a new KCI-resistant handshake based on NoiseIK in c-toxcore, which is backwards compatible to the current KCI-vulnerable handshake to enable interoperability. Further Noise's rekey feature will be evaluated for adoption.

>> Read more about Adopting the Noise Key Exchange in Tox

Nyxt — A programmable browser with advanced search integration

Nyxt is a new type of web browser designed to empower users to find and filter information on the Internet. Web browsers today, largely compete on performance in rendering, all whilst maintaining similar UIs. The common UI they employ is easy to learn, though unfortunately it is not effective for traversing the internet due to its limited capabilities. This presents itself as a problem when a user is trying to navigate the large amounts of data on the Internet and in their open tabs. To deal with this problem, Nyxt offers a set of powerful tools to index and jump around one's open tabs, through search results and the wider Internet. For example, Nyxt offers the ability for the user to filter and process their open tabs by semantic content search. Because each workflow and discipline is unique, the real advantage of Nyxt is in its fully programmable and open API. The user is free to modify Nyxt in any way they wish, even whilst it is running.

>> Read more about Nyxt

Nyxt — Browser integration of federated, distributed platforms

Nyxt is a new type of web browser designed to empower users to find and filter information on the Internet. The information available to browsers is limited by the protocols they understand; the languages they speak. Most browsers only speak HTTP(S), a protocol designed for client/server interactions.

In its latest generation, Nyxt plans to open up access to an Internet beyond HTTP, a larger, more decentralized Internet. The new versions of Nyxt will feature support for XMPP, ActivityPub, and IPFS. Together, these decentralized technologies will power much of the next generation of Internet technologies, and Nyxt will speak their language!

>> Read more about Nyxt

Open Know-How Search — Search Open Hardware Projects

Open Know-How Search is a project to create a search engine for the open source hardware designs. We are building a modern, clean and accessible search experience for makers. Our index will span the entire internet and all existing ways to share designs. Users and platforms will be able to make use of the Open Know-How meta-data standard to help get their projects into the index and surface those that are in advanced stages of development and worth looking at and attempting to re-build. The front page and top results in the search will be a useful resource to someone looking for a new open source hardware project to build and contribute to.

>> Read more about Open Know-How Search

Off-the-Record messaging version 4 — Advanced protocol for secure messaging

OTRv4 is the newest version of the Off-The-Record messaging protocol. It is a protocol where the newest academic research intertwines with real-world implementations. It's aim is to give end-to-end encryption, deniability, authentication, forward secrecy and post-compromise security for any kind of messaging (online or offline). The goal of this new version is to give the most secure privacy and security properties that have a real impact on the world. This new version aims to be available in different desktop clients (that use XMPP or other messaging protocol) and in mobile clients.

>> Read more about Off-the-Record messaging version 4

Improve Okular digital signature support — Improve open source tooling for digital signatures

Okular is a Free Software document viewer that supports multiple file formats such as PDF and OpenDocument Format, and besides viewing allows for annotation and digital signatures. It was initially created for desktop Linux and UNIX operating systems but meanwhile has grown into a universal, vendor-neutral document tool for all platforms - including an increasing amount of mobile operating systems such as Android, postmarketOS and pureOS. Digital signatures allow people to establish the source of documents, but can also be used to enter into legally binding agreements or contracts - so having a reliable and transparent solution is important. The aim of this project is to improve the support of PDF digital signatures in Okular both from the point of view of features and usability, making it easier for users to interact with this crucial privacy and security functionality.

>> Read more about Improve Okular digital signature support

Omnom — Self-hosted bookmarking and snapshotting with search

Omnom is a webpage bookmarking and snapshotting service. It consists of two parts, a web application which stores and serves the snapshots and the other part is a browser addon to create and save bookmarks. Snapshots created by Omnom are searchable, secure and exact copies of the rendered webpages, even with front-end heavy sites which require multiple actions to reach the relevant content. Omnom also provides functionality to tag bookmarks and highlight key information to be able to organize and efficiently search in your bookmarks and snapshots.

Omnom is a self-hosted free software which can handle multiple users with their own private and publicly visible bookmarks & snapshots. Public bookmarks are available in various formats to support feed creation or programmatic processing.

>> Read more about Omnom

Opaque Sphinx — Secure password-based authentication with Opaque/Sphinx

Opaque Sphinx is a project that aims to secure password-based authentication by deploying the state-of-the-art SPHINX and OPAQUE cryptographic protocols to eliminate almost all common attack vectors - such as weak guessable passwords, password reuse, phishing, password databases, offline dictionary attacks, database leaks - plaguing current solutions. These protocols provide the strongest available cryptographic properties with cryptographic proofs. The project intend to port its already existing free software SPHINX implementation - besides already existing support for Linux and Windows - to Android so it can also be used on smartphones.

>> Read more about Opaque Sphinx

Owncast — ActivityPub powered Livecasting

Owncast is a self-hosted, open source live streaming platform for people to easily host and manage their own live streams. It has become an increasingly popular option for many people to break away from the large centralized services. The project will add Fediverse (ActivityPub) integration in order to provide better means of discovery, increase engagement, and to have interoperability with other applications. The goal is for Owncast to become a fully fledged member of the Fediverse, focusing on people's streams being discovered with existing timelines and search indexes. This would allow people to for instance contribute comments directly from their own ActivityPub powered website or ActivityPub-powered link aggegators like Lemmy.

>> Read more about Owncast

P2Pcollab — Decentralised social search and discovery

This project is working towards creating a more decentralized, privacy-preserving, collaborative internet based on the end-to-end principle where users engage in peer-to-peer collaboration and have full control over their own data, enabling them to collaborate on, publish & subscribe to content in a decentralized way, as well as to discover & disseminate content based on collaborative filtering, while allowing local, offline search of all subscribed & discovered content. The project is researching & developing P2P gossip-based protocols and implementing them as composable libraries and lightweight unikernels with a focus on privacy, security, robustness, and scalability.

>> Read more about P2Pcollab

PGP4civiCRM — Add email encryption to CRM

E-mail security and privacy is not just relevant inside organisations or between individuals. A lot of email traffic comes from the institutions we all have to deal with, including some of the most confidential emails we get. And yet there is no way for users to protect their privacy and confidentiality when sending and receiving messages from organisations using such systems. PGP4civiCRM enables automatic PGP encryption/decryption of e-mails on the server side. While the project will provide special integration for the Constituent Relation Management System CiviCRM, the basic functionality can be used also with regular mailservers like postfix. The PGP4civiCRM core will basically be a milter, that listens for input messages, then looks up PGP keys from configurable sources (local key rings, LDAP) and then, based on a local, configurable, policy, encrypts/decrypts messages (or leaves them untouched) before passing them on. This way system administrators can with tiny effort provide transparent encryption support for all their mail users. Especially for CiviCRM the project will create an extension that allows easy web-based configuration of the relevant pieces and displaying of encrypted, received e-mails using OpenPGP.js.

>> Read more about PGP4civiCRM

Peertube-Desktop — Enjoy and share federated videos

Cuttlefish is a client for PeerTube that will allow for searching and discovering new and interesting video's online with more privacy. PeerTube is a federated video hosting service based on the W3C ActivityPub standard. By using WebTorrent - a version of BitTorrent that runs in the browser - users help serve videos to other users. Cuttlefish is a desktop client for PeerTube, but will work on GNU/Linux-based phones (like the Librem 5 or Pinephone) as well.

We want the experience of watching PeerTube videos and using PeerTube in general to be better, by making a native application that will become the best and most efficient way to hook into the federation of interconnected video hosting services. It will have improved search, and will allow people to continue sharing watched videos with other PeerTube users for longer periods of time, instead of discarding the video when done watching. It will also help bridge PeerTube's gap between the - now separated - BitTorrent and WebTorrent networks by speaking both of those protocols.

>> Read more about Peertube-Desktop

Extending PeerTube — Adding advanced search capabailities to PeerTube

This project aims to extend PeerTube to support the availability, accessibility, and discoverability of large-scale public media collections on the next generation internet. Although PeerTube is technically capable to support the distribution of large public media collections, the platform currently lacks practical examples and extensive documentation to achieve this in a timely and cost-efficient way. This project will function as a proof-of-concept that will showcase several compelling improvements to the PeerTube software by [1] developing and demonstrating the means needed for this end by migrating a large corpus of open video content, [2] implementing trustworthy open licensing metadata standards for video publication through the PeerTube platform, [3] and emphasizing the importance of accompanying subtitle files by recommending ways to generate them.

>> Read more about Extending PeerTube

Peppol for the masses — Hybrid self-hosted e-invoicing with decentralized identities

Peppol is an EU-backed e-Invoicing network which uses a top-down certification infrastructure to establish trust between the sender and the receiver of an invoice. In the "Peppol for the Masses!" project, we will implement Peppol in PHP (so far only Java and C# implementations are available), and package its core components (the AS4 sender and the AS4 receiver) as a Nextcloud app, so that users of the popular Nextcloud personal cloud server can send and receive invoices over AS4 directly into their self-hosted server.

Due to the top-down nature of Peppol's trust infrastructure, it's not possible to self-host a node in the Peppol network unless you go through a reasonably heavy certification process. Therefore, we will extend our implementation with support for self-hosted identities, using the "WebID" identity pattern which was popularized by the Solid project. We will also develop a re-signing gateway which replaces the signature on an AS4-Direct invoice with a Peppol-certified signature. In a follow-up project, we will also host an instance of this re-signing gateway and make it available free of charge, similar to how the LetsEncrypt project has made TLS certificates available free of charge.

This project will lower the (cost) barrier for machine-readable cryptographically-signed e-Invoicing messages, and at the same time increase the sovereignty of end-users, towards a human-centric internet of business documents.

>> Read more about Peppol for the masses

A Distributed Software Stack For Co-operation — Facilitating easy ad hoc cooperation

Perspectives aims to be to co-operation, what ActivityPub is to social networks. It provides the conceptual building blocks for co-operation, laying the groundwork for a federated, fully distributed infrastructure that supports endless varieties of co-operation. The declarative Perspectives Language allows a model to translate instantly in an application that supports multiple users to contribute to a shared process, each with her own unique perspective. The project builds a reference implementation of the distributed stack that executes these models of co-operation, and makes the information concerned searchable.

Real life is an endless affair of interlocking activities. Likewise, Perspectives models of services can overlap and build on common concepts, thus forming a federated conceptual space that allows users to move from one service to another as the need arises in a most natural way. Such an infrastructure functions as a map, promoting discovery, decreasing dependency on explicit search. However, rather than being an on-line information source to be searched, such the traditional Yellow Pages, Perspectives models allow their users (individuals and organisations alike) to interact and deal with each other on-line. Supply-demand matching in specific domains (e.g. local transport) integrates readily with such an infrastructure. Other patterns of integrating search with co-operation support form a promising area for further research.

>> Read more about A Distributed Software Stack For Co-operation

PixelDroid — Share and browse photos in the fediverse with a mobile app

PixelDroid is an Android client for Pixelfed, the federated image sharing platform based on W3C ActivityPub. Our goal is to bring the Pixelfed platform to Android and provide a mobile user experience that excites. We aim to provide feature-parity with the Pixelfed web client as well as add additional features - like image and video editing, capturing and uploading directly from the app. During the project we will also make it easy to use multiple accounts, even across different instances. Additionally, we want to contribute to the Pixelfed API with testing and additional documentation.

>> Read more about PixelDroid

Pixelfed Live — Live streaming and other Pixelfed enhancements

Pixelfed is an open source and decentralised photo sharing platform, in the same vein as services like Instagram. The twist is that you can yourself run the service, or pick a reliable party to run it for you. Who better to trust with your privacy and the privacy of the people that follow you? The magic behind this is the ActivityPub protocol - which means you can comment, follow, like and share from other Pixelfed servers around the world as if you were all on the same website. Timelines are in chronological order, and there is no need to track users or sell their data. The platform has many features including Discover, Hashtags, Geotagging, Photo Albums, Photo Filters and a few still in development like Ephemeral Stories. After supporting development of social discovery and a mobile app, NGI Zero funds this project to add a much requested live streaming feature to Pixelfed.

>> Read more about Pixelfed Live

Pixelfed — ActivityPub driven decentralised photo sharing platform

Pixelfed is an open source and decentralised photo sharing platform, in the same vein as services like Instagram. The twist is that you can yourself run the service, or pick a reliable party to run it for you. Who better to trust with your privacy and the privacy of the people that follow you? The magic behind this is the ActivityPub protocol - which means you can comment, follow, like and share from other Pixelfed servers around the world as if you were all on the same website. Timelines are in chronological order, and there is no need to track users or sell their data. The project has many features including Discover, Hashtags, Geotagging, Photo Albums, Photo Filters and a few still in development like Ephemeral Stories. The goal of the project is among others to solidify the technical base, add new features and design and build a mobile app that is compatible with Mastodon apps like Fedilab and Tusky.

>> Read more about Pixelfed

Prosody IM — Implement SASL authentication mechanism for XMPP

XMPP is the most widely deployed standard protocol for real-time messaging today, and is a very popular choice among individuals and organizations who wish to manage their own internet communications, instead of submitting to other (e.g. commercial/data-driven) communication platforms. For an XMPP user to log in to their account today, two things are required: a username and a password. This has remained unchanged for many years, while other technologies have been steadily advancing to support security-enhancing features such as multi-factor authentication or even self-sovereign identities.

XMPP uses an authentication umbrella standard known as SASL to authenticate all connections.The way XMPP integrates SASL is defined in RFC 6120 and assumes a very simple challenge-response flow, which has worked well in allowing us to upgrade the network from older SASL mechanisms such as DIGEST-MD5 and onto more modern mechanisms such as SCRAM-SHA-1 and SCRAM-SHA-256.

To gain new authentication features beyond simple password authentication, we need to evolve XMPP’s relationship with SASL. This project will deliver just that, and will be the first complete implementation of a proposed standard (XEP-0388: Extensible SASL Profile) into the popular Prosody XMPP server. It will also implement support for per-session access control throughout Prosody, and support for XEP-0386 (Bind 2.0).

>> Read more about Prosody IM

Ricochet Refresh — Anonymous, meta-data free secure messaging

Ricochet Refresh, is a metadataless messenger for PCs (Windows, macOS, Unix) that provides anonymity as well as security. By using Tor, it allows people at risk making public interest disclosures to communicate in chat sessions with anonymity to journalists, members of parliament, regulators protecting the environment, financial malfeasance investigators and others who have the power in society to act as corrective mechanisms to serious wrongdoing. This project will update Ricochet, reduce known security risks, and ensure continued compatibility with Tor's onion services protocol. The possibility of anonymous communication is important for everyone, but particularly vital for those who risk reprisal in their workplace or other institutions to be able to speak up. Through anonymity, Ricochet Refresh allows the focus to be on the disclosure, not on the source or whistleblower. Thus, the project provides a tool in support of evidence-based reporting in the public interest by creating a safe on-going channel for the journalist to conduct verification as the story develops.

>> Read more about Ricochet Refresh

SES - SimplyEdit Spaces — SimplyEdit Spaces - collaborative presentations

SimplyPresent allows users to collaboratively create and deliver good looking presentation using CRDT's through Hyper Hyper Space - another project supported by NGI Assure. SimplyPresent is itself based on top of the open source SimplyEdit tool, adding advanced user-friendly presentation features. SimplyPresent allows team members to live edit a presentation and the presenter notes while the presentation is being given, control the presentation from any phone without complicated setup: all that is needed on the presenting system or with remote viewers is a URL which will sync through Hyper Hyper Space.

>> Read more about SES - SimplyEdit Spaces

SensifAI — AI driven image tagging

Billions of users manually upload their captured videos and images to cloud storages such as Dropbox, Google Drive and Apple iCloud straight from their camera or phone. Their private pictures and video material are subsequently stored unprotected somewhere else on some remote computer, in many cases in another country with quite different legislation. Users depend on the tools from these service providers to browse their archives of often thousands and thousands of videos and photo's in search of some specific image or video of interest. The direct result of this is continuous exposure to cyber threats like extortion and an intrinsic loss of privacy towards the service providers. There is a perfectly valid user-centric approach possible in dealing with such confidential materials, which is to encrypt everything before uploading anything to the internet. At that point the user may be a lot more safe, but from now on would have a hard time locating any specific videos or images in their often very large collection. What if smart algorithms could describe the pictures for you, recognise who is in it and you can store this information and use it to conveniently search and share? This project develops an open source smart-gallery app which uses machine learning to recognize and tag all visual material automatically - and on the device itself. After that, the user can do what she or he wants with the additional information and the original source material. They can save them to local storage, using the tags for easy search and navigation. Or offload the content to the internet in encrypted form, and use the descriptions and tags to navigate this remote content. Either option makes images and videos searchable while fully preserving user privacy.

>> Read more about SensifAI

Solid-NextCloud app — Bridge Nextcloud to Solid

This project connects the world of Solid with the world of Nextcloud. The aim is to develop an open source Nextcloud app that turns a Nextcloud server into a spec-compliant Solid server. It gives every user a WebID profile and allows Solid apps to store data on the user's Nextcloud account. It also exposes some of the user's existing Nextcloud data like contacts and calendar events as Solid user data, so that Solid apps can interact with the user's Nextcloud data, and allow the user to manage which Solid apps can access which specific aspects of the user's personal data. We will make our implementation compatible with the latest version of the Solid spec (including DPop tokens and the WebSockets AUTH command), and contribute the surface tests we create for this as a well-documented independent test-suite, for other Solid server implementers to benefit from. We will also publish a stand-alone version of our PHP components, which can run independently of Nextcloud.

>> Read more about Solid-NextCloud app

Solid-Search — Queries in a pod

Solid-Search aims to provide an open source module that adds full-text search functionality to Solid pods. Solid is an emergent specification initiated by the inventor of the World Wide Web, sir Tim Berners-Lee. Solid aims to decentralize the web by decoupling applications from databases by introducing Solid Pods (personal online datastores that are in full control of the data owner). Having a way to search through your personal data on your Solid Pod is a must-have for the project to become truly successful. However, this requires technology that does not exist yet: a full-text search interface that works with schema-less RDF data. In order to maximize adoption and retain a modular, open approach, we will standardize the way in which data changes are described. By doing so, it will be relatively easy to introduce new search / query systems (such as search by location). The project will will create the open source search back-end, improve linked data synchronisation specs, link the module to two solid implementations, create a front-end for end-users, and write a tutorial for adding data sources.

>> Read more about Solid-Search

Solid Control — Access Control mechanism for data and services within Solid

Solid-Control aims to enhance Tim Berners-Lee's Social Linked Data Project (Solid) with Attribute-Based Access Control. By extending the Linked Data Platform (LDP) with WebID based authentication and Access Control Lists (ACL), Solid has enabled the emergence of new forms of Hyper-Apps. These apps can follow data from server to server, authenticate when needed and write to the user's Personal Online Data storage (Pod), creating a decentralised social web.

With relation-based access control (friend of a friend, business network, etc.), Solid can be a full alternative to centralised social networks. We also want to allow authentication based on Verifiable Claims such as age. Solid-Control will work on developing the needed logic, verify protocols, write prototype implementations and contribute to the Solid Auth Community groups, which are developing specs for standardisation.

>> Read more about Solid Control

Secure User Interfaces (Spritely) — Usability of decentralised social media

Spritely is a project to advance the federated social network by adding richer communication and privacy/security features to the network. This particular sub-project aims to demonstrate how user interfaces can and should play an important role in user security. The core elements necessary for secure interaction are shown through a simple chat interface which integrates a contact list as an easy-to-use implementation of a "petname interface". Information from this contact list is integrated throughout the implementation in such a way that helps reduce phishing risk, aids discovery of meeting other users, and requires no centralized naming authority. As an additional benefit, this project will demonstrate some of the asynchronous network programming features of the Spritely development stack.

>> Read more about Secure User Interfaces (Spritely)

Spritely — Capability based petname system

Users are currently caught between two worlds of identity solutions: prepackaged centralized identity silos (which also tend to be very phishing-vulnerable) and more decentralized naming systems that awkwardly separate the experience of secure connections from identity. What if instead users could have an experience where decentralized naming was a natural outgrowth of using the application? Spritely is a laboratory project to advance the decentralized social web founded by authors of the popular ActivityPub federated social web protocol. Spritely's approach to decentralized naming systems is to implement a "petnames system", where local meaning is given to "petnames" to otherwise non-human-meaningful decentralized identifiers (such as a hash of cryptographic key material). An important part of this design is that decentralized naming flows should be a natural part of use of the program.

Petnames tend to resemble local contacts in a "contact list", but petnames on their own do not provide a sufficient way to discover, meet, and come to trust new contacts. A complete petname system also provides "edge names": for example "CWebber=>JessicaTallon" would show JessicaTallon as an "edge name" proposed by the petname CWebber. Our system also provides support for contacts introduced in a context with no existing relationships; these are called "self-proposed names" and are rendered in a way distinct from petnames and edge names. This has been under-implemented in existing petname systems; since Spritely is implementing decentralized communication systems, this will be a full implementation of a petname system (including edge names and self-proposed names) in an ergonomic manner that can also be applied to other decentralized systems. In addition to a specification, the project will delivered a usable chat application plus contact list.

>> Read more about Spritely

StreetComplete UX — Improve usability of StreetComplete

OpenStreetMap is the best source of information for general purpose search engines that need a geographic data about locations and properties of various objects. The objects vary from cities and other settlements to shops, parks, roads, schools, railways, motorways, forests, beaches etc etc etc. The search engine can use the data to answer queries such as "route to nearest wheelchair accessible greengrocer", "list of national parks near motorways" or "London weather". Full OpenStreetMap dataset is publicly available on an open license and already used for many purposes.

The project will make collecting open data for OpenStreetMap easier and more efficient, and lower the threshold for contribution by improving usability and accessibility. Any user should be able to help improve OpenStreetMap data, simply by downloading the app from F-droid or Google store and map as they walk.

>> Read more about StreetComplete UX

Sylk chat — Add instant messaging features to Sylk

Internet communications privacy is important to users, and there is a limited set of encrypted multiparty audio and videoconferencing solutions available to consumers and businesses today. The market, predominantly occupied by proprietary services that often require risky plugins, lack introspection and transparency, proved to expose users to significant security and privacy issues. This trend must be counteracted by better open source equivalents. Sylk provides a multi-party video encrypted conferencing solution meant to run on an end user computer or a mobile device. It is based on the WebRTC standard, and has a focus on user privacy and easy of use. This project will add one-to-one and group chat capabilities, allowing users to for example have end-to-end encryption or maintain long term group chats like other messaging apps do.

>> Read more about Sylk chat

Sylk Client — Secure multiparty videoconferencing application

Internet communications privacy is important to users, and there is a limited set of encrypted multiparty audio and videoconferencing solutions available to consumers and businesses today. The market, predominantly occupied by proprietary services that often require risky plugins, lack introspection and transparency, proved to expose users to significant security and privacy issues. This trend must be counteracted by better open source equivalents.

SylkSuite, composed by SylkServer and SylkClient is a clean and elegant open source multiparty conferencing solution for both the client and a server written in Python. SylkSuite allows groups of users to communicate privately with rich multimedia, accessed through different protocol stacks. SylkSuite allows bridging SIP clients, XMPP endpoints and WebRTC applications by using Janus backend.

The developers have a focus on strong interoperability based on the use of open standards.

>> Read more about Sylk Client

Sylk Mobile — Secure real-time mobile communications

Internet communications privacy is important to users, and there is a limited set of encrypted multiparty audio and videoconferencing solutions available to consumers and businesses today. The market, predominantly occupied by proprietary services that often require risky plugins, lack introspection and transparency, proved to expose users to significant security and privacy issues. This trend must be counteracted by better open source equivalents. Sylk Mobile provides a multi-party video encrypted conferencing solution mean to run on an end user computer or a mobile device. It is based on the WebRTC standard, and has a focus on user privacy and easy of use.

>> Read more about Sylk Mobile

Tantum Search — Context-enhanced search driven by schema.org

Tantum Search’s goal is to present information in a fair and transparent context for the users. The platform lets users make an inventory of any information using schema.org schemas (like video, audio, paintings, ebooks, events, goods, services) and allows users to search through these entries on three axes: word, contextual and geo reference resolution. Providers of information can easily and without great effort add their information to the platform and make it available online – the platform automatically creates an interactive page which will be search engine optimized and users get free and unbiased access to search for goods and services. The ranking focuses on the search query and less on link popularity. Thus, ‘internet giants’ are not necessarily listed at the top due to their popularity and in addition, the ranking algorithm will be transparently released as open source so the community can optimize it.

>> Read more about Tantum Search

Tauri Apps — A safer run-time for web technology based apps

Tauri is a toolkit that helps developers make more trustworthy applications for the major desktop platforms - using virtually any frontend framework in existence. A popular use case is to create a desktop or mobile version of a web app, rather than wasting effort on creating native clients for each platform. Unlike other solutions (e.g. Microsoft's Electron), it is built in the type-safe language Rust - and the team has a focus on strong isolation, shielding the user from malicious or untrusted code downloaded "live" from the internet. After all, once breached, such an app can for instance siphon off cryptocurrencies or bootstrap other more persistent malware.

In this project, the team works among others on a particularly innovative feature, to prevent JS injection for all application types. In this approach Rust Code Injection is used alongside dependency-free EcmaScript, Object.freeze(), and a filtering iFrame that is the only subsystem permitted to communicate with the API. This will help to create more secure applications,

>> Read more about Tauri Apps

TypeCell — CRDT-based collaborative block-based editor

TypeCell aims to make software development more open, simple and accessible. TypeCell integrates a live-programming environment as a first-class citizen in an end-user block-based document editor, forming an open source application platform where users can instantly inspect, edit and collaborate on the software they’re using. TypeCell spans a number of different projects improving and building on top of Matrix, Yjs and Prosemirror to advance local-first, distributed and collaborative software for the web.

>> Read more about TypeCell

ValOS Cryptographic Content Security project — Cryptographic Content Security for ValOS

ValOS (Valaa Open System) is a project pushing programming to become a civic skill. It’s a decentralized software development architecture that empowers beginners with little training or prior experience to create practical web applications. ValOS applications and data are created, stored and distributed as event streams. ValOS Gateway is a JavaScript library that acts like a browser: it connects to event streams, reduces them into applications and provides means to induce new events. ValOS Cryptographic Content Security project focuses on enhancing the infrastructure level security of ValOS through event log hash chaining, end-to-end encryption and other features.

>> Read more about ValOS Cryptographic Content Security project

VFRAME: Visual Defense Tools — Use computer-vision to shield privacy in video

Visible data shares many of the same risks as wireless data yet visual privacy is often overlooked in the field of information security studies as separate and less relevant. As computer vision becomes increasingly adept at understanding the visual domain, differences between existing protocols for processing wireless data and emerging protocols for processing visible data (computer vision) become less apparent. Ultimately, images and video are wireless data too, and they are exposed to an increasing number of attacks on visual information privacy with less technologies for protection. Visual Defense Tools will explore and prototype computer vision methods for visual privacy through visual obfuscation and minimization techniques, mostly related to biometrics. The goal will be to build a conceptual road map and functional open-source prototypes to stimulate future development of more accessible visual privacy technologies.

>> Read more about VFRAME: Visual Defense Tools

Video chat privacy — Add privacy features to video chats

Making video calls can be very invasive to privacy: the camera does not only capture the face and posture of the person talking, but will in fact capture the entire environment in glorious high definition - from the books in your bookshelf to family members or laundry rack behind you. This information is of no interest to the other end, but with a camera you have little choice: once you slide open the camera cover, it takes everything within the field of view and broadcasts it to the other side. This project aims to use advanced AI technology to edit the video feed in real-time, and apply various privacy enhancements such as removal of backgrounds.

>> Read more about Video chat privacy

Waasabi Framework — P2P Live Streaming for events

Waasabi is a highly customizable platform for self-hosted video streaming (live broadcast) events. It is provided as a flexible open source web framework that anyone can host and integrate directly into their existing website. By focusing on quick setup, ease of use and customizability Waasabi aims to lower the barrier of entry for hosting custom live streaming events on one's own website, side-stepping the cost, compromises and limitations stemming from using various "batteries-included" offerings, but also removing the hassle of having to build everything from scratch. Active research into the creation of a peer-to-peer streaming backend seeks to advance the project's long-term goal of promoting the adoption of owned experiences through the use of decentralized technology. By further cutting down on dependencies, cost and infrastructure complexity this effort aims to enable broadcasts to scale as the audience size grows, which in turn will support Waasabi's continued adoption.

>> Read more about Waasabi Framework

Independent captions and transcript augmentation — Speech-to-text integration for Waasabi

Waasabi is a highly customizable platform for self-hosted video streaming (live broadcast) events. It is provided as a flexible open source web framework that anyone can host and integrate directly into their existing website. By focusing on quick setup, ease of use and customizability Waasabi aims to lower the barrier of entry for hosting custom live streaming events on one's own website, side-stepping the cost, compromises and limitations stemming from using various "batteries-included" offerings, but also removing the hassle of having to build everything from scratch.

In this project the team seeks to integrate tools for transcript augmentation, augmented human captioning and automatic machine-generated captions using open-source software based on machine learning and royalty-free training data and models. The primary use case is live captioning for live internet broadcasts (primarily video streaming). With such tools online event organizers will be able to create interactive transcripts and better live captions for their events anytime everywhere - and without external dependencies.

>> Read more about Independent captions and transcript augmentation

XWiki — Bring wiki capabilities into the Fediverse

XWiki is a modern and extensible open source wiki platform. Up until now, XWiki had been focusing on providing the best collaboration experience and features to its users. We're now taking this to the next level by having XWiki be part of the larger federation of collaboration and social software (a.k.a. fediverse), thus allowing users to collaborate externally. XWiki is embracing the W3C ActivityPub specification. Specifically we're implementing the server part of the specification, to be able to both view activity and content happening in external services inside XWiki itself and to make XWiki's activity and content available from these other services too. A specific but crucial use case, is to allow content collaboration between different XWiki servers, sharing content and activity.

>> Read more about XWiki

WordPress ActivityPub — Bring ActivityPub social networking to the widely used Wordpress

WordPress ActivityPub is a plugin that allows your site users to interact with other users in the fediverse. Currently the plugin supports Follows by remote users, sending out pubilc posts to followers, and receiving remote users public Comments on local posts. This project will develop features allowing for a more rich and typical social experience with Direct messages, Followers only posts, and Threaded comments to and from the fediverse. Moderation tools will be included and user privacy features will also be developed.

>> Read more about WordPress ActivityPub

XWiki ActivityPub — First class ActivityPub support in XWiki

XWiki is a modern and extensible open source wiki platform. XWiki is the first wiki that is part of the larger federation of collaboration and social software (a.k.a. fediverse), allowing users to collaborate externally. XWiki is embracing the W3C ActivityPub specification. Specifically we're implementing the server part of the specification, to be able to both view activity and content happening in external services inside XWiki itself and to make XWiki's activity and content available from these other services too. A specific but crucial use case, is to allow content collaboration between different XWiki servers, sharing content and activity.

>> Read more about XWiki ActivityPub

Yrs — Collaborative editing with CRDT written in Rust

Yrs "wires" will be a native port (in the Rust programming language) of the Yjs shared editing framework. Abstractly speaking, Yjs allows many users to concurrently manipulate state that eventually converges. It is a popular solution for enabling collaborative editing (Google Docs style) on the web because it is indefinitely scalable, works peer-to-peer, and has a rich ecosystem of plugins. There are plugins that allow you to connect with other peers over different network providers (WebRTC, Websocket, Dat/Hyper, IPFS, XMPP, ..) and there are many editor plugins that allow you to make existing (rich-)text editors collaborative.

The Yjs project is about connecting projects with each other and providing a network-agnostic solution for syncing state. A native port will allow native applications (e.g. XI, Vi, Emacs, Android, iPhone, ..) to sync state with web-based applications. We chose Rust because it's well suited to be embedded in other languages like C/C++, PHP, Python, Swift, and Java. With Yrs, we want to connect even more projects with each other and provide a modern collaboration engine for native applications.

The Rust implementation will implement the full feature set of the shared types, including the event system. This will enable users to parse existing Yjs documents, manipulate them, and implement collaborative applications. The port will make it easy to "bind" to another language so that the shared state is available in other languages as well. There will likely be a WASM binding, a C++ binding, and a Python binding (provided by Quantstack). Other existing features like awareness, selective Undo/Redo manager, relative positions, and differential updates will be added after the initial release.

>> Read more about Yrs

Yrs Undo — Rust-based CRDT framework for real-time multi-user applications

Yrs "wires" is a native port (in the Rust programming language) of the Yjs shared editing framework. Abstractly speaking, Yjs allows many users to concurrently manipulate state that eventually converges. It is a popular solution for enabling collaborative editing (Google Docs style) on the web because it is indefinitely scalable, works peer-to-peer, and has a rich ecosystem of plugins. There are plugins that allow you to connect with other peers over different network providers (WebRTC, Websocket, Dat/Hyper, IPFS, XMPP, ..) and there are many editor plugins that allow you to make existing (rich-)text editors collaborative. This project will add a selective Undo/Redo manager, include support for other native clients and to interop with languages like Java, PHP and Swift. The goal is to reach full feature compatibility with Yjs and improve its performance even more - bringing a collaborative, decentralized experience where users' data lies in their own hands.

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Reinstatement of crypto.signText() — Cryptographic signatures brought back to the browser

Since the 1990s Netscape and Firefox supported the ability to sign an arbitrary piece of text with a digital certificate, and have that signature returned to the webserver. The texts being signed have historically ranged from transaction records, financial declarations, and court documents. This project implements a set of Native Browser Web Extensions that bring the digital signing of text to all modern browsers that support the NMBE standard. The process of choosing the certificates and generating the signatures is performed outside of the browser, using APIs native to each operating system. Web pages communicate with the extensions using the Javascript crypto.signText() function, and the signed documents are returned packaged as a PKCS7 response. The project aims to make digital signing accessible, while being browser agnostic.

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fediverse.space — Find your way in the Fediverse

Fediverse.space is a tool for understanding decentralized social networks, and searching through them. The fediverse, or federated universe, is the set of social media servers, hosted by individuals across the globe, forming a libre and more democratic alternative to traditional social media. When displaying these servers in an intuitive visualization, clusters quickly emerge. For instance, servers with the same primary language will be close to each other. There are more subtle groupings, too: topics of discussion, types of users (serious vs. ironic), and political leanings all play a role. fediverse.space aims to be the best tool for understanding and discovering communities on this emerging social network.

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Securing Decentralised Live Information with m-ld — Collaborative editing of LInked Data based on CRDT

m-ld is a software technology for live information sharing. It enables software engineers to reliably add real-time collaboration, support for offline working, and service resilience to both new and existing software architectures. It achieves this by operating at an "information" level, creating reusable patterns for maintaining the consistency and integrity of application content that is being edited from multiple locations at once. m-ld is built from the ground up on a W3C standard information representation, contributing ideas for its evolution, and is committed to open standards and open source. This project will research and prototype modifications to the primitives of the m-ld core protocol to natively support strong assurance of data integrity and traceability, with authority assignable to identified users or groups, so that they can be reliably assured of the integrity and controlled availability of their data.

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Minedive — P2P search over webRTC

The minedive project is building several components: first, minedive is a browser extension aiming to allow users to search the web while preserving their anonymity and privacy. The second is an open source reference implementation of its rendez-vous server. minedive instances connect each-other (via WebRTC data channels) forming a two layered P2P network. The lower layer (L1) provides routing, the upper layer (L2) provides anonymous and encrypted communication among peers acting as a MIX network. This architecture guarantees that peers which know your IP address (L1) do not know search data for (L2) and vice-versa. A central (websocket) rendez-vous server is needed to find and connect with L1 peers, and to exchange keys with L2 peers, but no search goes through it. We are running a default server which can be overridden by users who want to run their own (using our reference implementation or a custom one). Users can also set the extension to pick peers from a given community (identified by an opaque tag). Currently all requests are satisfied by letting L2 peers return results from the 1st page of mainstream search engines (as they see it, in an attempt to escape the search bubble). While this will stay as a fallback, we plan to implement web crawling on peers, doing keyword extraction from URLs in local bookmarks and history and ranking with open algorithms, being transparent with users about which techniques are used and open to suggestions.

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Search and Displace — Find and redact privacy sensitive information

The goal of this project is to establish a workflow and toolchain which can address the problem of mass search and displacement for document content where the original documents are in a range of forms, including a wide variety of digital document formats, both binary and more modern compressed XML forms, and potentially even encompassing older documents where the only surviving form is printed or even handwritten. The term "displacement" is meant to encompass actions taken on the discovered content that are beyond straight replacement, including content tagging and redaction, as well as more complex contextual and user-refined replacement on an iterative basis. It is assumed that this process will be a server application with documents uploaded as needed, on either an individual or bulk upload basis. The solution would be built in a modular fashion so that future deployments could deploy and/or modify only the parts needed. In practical terms this involves the creation of an open source tool chain that facilitates searching for private and confidential content inside documents, for instance attachments to email messages or documents that are to be published on a website. The tool can subsequently be used for the secure and automated redaction of sensitive documents; by building this as a modular solution enables the solution to be used “standalone” with a simple GUI, or used via command line, or embedded within 3rd party systems such as document management systems, content management systems and machine learning systems. In addition a modular approach will facilitate the use of the solution both with different languages (natural and programming) and different specialities e.g. government archives, winning tenders, legal contracts, court documents etc..

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