Community workshops

We organise community workshops with the aim of bringing people with common interests together. Each workshop focuses on a specific theme or field. The aim is to weave communities and people together who are working on or interested in the same theme. The format is a 2 hour workshop in which we will explore shared challenges and questions, exchanging ideas, and aligning on potential concrete next steps.
We'll have workshops on the following topics: Open Publishing, Distributed, Open Source Chip Design, Web Browsers and Large Language Models. (And previously did workshops on Search.)

Where & when

Sessions take place online on the first and third Monday of the month at 14.00 CEST (Amsterdam, Berlin, Rome).
Sessions will be hosted on a BigBlueButton platform. We'll publish the link to the Big Blue Button platform here closer to the date.

How to join

Sign up: Each workshop has its own unique sign-up form which you can find below.
If you plan on attending, do sign up. We use the input to check if there is enough interest to go ahead. (Feel free to use a throw-away mail address).

Who is invited and what is the goal

With these community workshops we aim to bring together people who are working on similar topics and problems. The goal is to foster collaboration and create communities of practice. We are directly inviting participants in the Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative but anyone who is interested is welcome. Although we hope people will be able to build meaningful relationships, joining a workshop does not commit you to anything, of course.

Stay informed about future NGI community events?

The community workshops are a continuation of the NGI Innovater meetups. Perhaps we will organize other NGI community activities in the future. If you would like to be informed if we do so, you can leave your email in this form.

Community workshops

Open Publishing

Date: Monday, October 6, 2025
Time: 14.00 - 16.00 CEST
Location: Online, we'll publish the link to the BigBlueButton platform here closer to the date.
Sign up: Cryptpad form. If you'd like to join, do sign-up so we know there is enough interest to go ahead.

For this workshop we invite people interested in the future of printing and publishing (book publishing, Web-to-Print, etc). The workshop facilitates networking to bring like-minded people together and identify shared challenges, exhange ideas and potential concrete next steps.

Open Source Chip Design

Co-organized with The Free Silicon Foundation

Date: Monday, November 3, 2025
Time: 14.00 - 16.00 CEST
Location: Online, we'll publish the link to the BigBlueButton platform here closer to the date.
Sign up: Cryptpad form. If you'd like to join, do sign-up so we know there is enough interest to go ahead.

This workshop is for anyone who is interested in meeting new people in the field of open source chip design. This includes topics like EDA, libre chip CPU, FPGA, compliance & testing, gateware, embedding chips in cool things, et cetera.

Co-organizer is the Free Silicon Foundation (F-Si), a nonprofit organization with the scope of promoting: Free and Open Source CAD tools for designing integrated circuits; the sharing of hardware designs and libraries; common standards; and the freedom of users in the context of silicon integrated circuits. F-Si is also the organizer of the annual Free Silicon conference.

Web Browsers

Date: Monday, November 17, 2025
Time: 14.00 - 16.00 CEST
Location: Online, we'll publish the link to the BigBlueButton platform here closer to the date.
Sign up: Cryptpad form. If you'd like to join, do sign-up so we know there is enough interest to go ahead.

With this workshop we aim to bring people together who are working on the web browser stack and technologies like rendering engines, JavaScript engines, DOM, CSSOM, Web APIs, browser extensions, Web RTC, developer tools, et cetera.

Peer-4-peer

Date: Monday, November 24, 2025
Time: 14.00 - 16.00 CEST
Location: Online, we'll publish the link to the BigBlueButton platform here closer to the date.
Sign up: Cryptpad form. If you'd like to join, do sign-up so we know there is enough interest to go ahead.

P4P stands for Peer-4-Peer, or Peer-for-Peer, and is a category of protocols which combine the qualities of local-first with Peer-2-Peer (P2P) and open-source ethos. Characterized by protocols such as Scuttlebutt, P2Panda, PZP, Earthstar, Willow, Radicle.xyz and many more, the networks provide routing agnostic features enabling offline as well as online usage. The term has relatively recently gained popularity as opposed to longer descriptives such as “offline-first, peer-to-peer and open-source networks ” and it’s origins stem back to a conference in 2023 by the same name which gathered protocol developers and enthusiasts. (Source: Z. Elfen 2025)

Large Language Models

Date: Monday, December 1, 2025
Time: 14.00 - 16.00 CEST
Location: Online, we'll publish the link to the BigBlueButton platform here closer to the date.
Sign up: Cryptpad form. If you'd like to join, do sign-up so we know there is enough interest to go ahead.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are advanced machine learning systems trained on vast amounts of text data to generate, understand, and manipulate natural language. They form the backbone of many state-of-the-art applications in natural language processing, powering tasks such as text generation, summarization, translation, and conversational agents. In recent years, open-source LLMs have become a rapidly growing field, offering transparent, community-driven alternatives to proprietary models.

Previous workshops

Future of Search

Co-organized with Open Search Foundation

The community workshop on the Future of Search took place on September 17, 2025. It brought together 22 participants who exchanged ideas and got to know from each other what they are working on. Participants who wish to continue the conversation with others who are interested in Open Web Search were invited to join the Open Web Search Community on Mattermost.
The workshop was hosted by Zenna (NGI Search) & Ursula (Open Search Foundation) with support from Lwenn and Tessel, both from NLnet.

Acknowledgements

The workshops are organized by NLnet on behalf of NGI Zero in collaboration with our sister NGI programme NGI Search. Some workshops have third collaborator specific to the topic.

Innovator meetups

The community workshops are a continuation of the Innovator meetups started by the NGI Outreach Office spearheaded by Thomas Wilczek and Fernando Rullan, and supported by the NGI Impact Working Group. The meetups addresed the question: What does it take to build a sustainable, impactful, and collaborative open-source ecosystem in Europe? The first Innovator meetup took place onine on November 12, 2024. The second was an in-person meeting during OW2 con on June 18, 2025.