It is wonderful to see the growing number of people working on digital commons, inventing and improving technologies to the benefit of all humanity. 42 of such projects have been selected for funding in the October call of the NGI Zero Commons Fund. In terms of applications, it was the largest call round in NGI Zero's life time. And we'd like to take this space to thank all applicants for their contributions to an internet for people rather than for profit.
The selected projects all contribute, one way or another, to the mission of the Commons Fund: reclaiming the public nature of the internet. For example, there are people working on interesting open hardware projects such as the MNT Reform Touch (tablet device) and the Solar FemtoTX motherboard — a collaborative effort to create an ultra-low power motherboard that can run on solar power.
MOTIS enables door-to-door real-time routing for European Public Transport. bcachefs readies itself as the next generation filesystem for Linux, improving performance, scalability and reliability when compared to legacy filesystems and KDE Plasma Gestures will add multi-touch and stroke gestures to the Plasma Desktop.
LiberaFormsi, the only forms solution that offers end-to-end-encryption out of the box, will develop new features and improve its UX to make it even more compelling for for instance educational use cases.
There are other educational tools such as ClassQuiz allows schools to quiz their students without privacy concerns, Federating pedagogical immersive experiences that is building a framework for playful learning content in enhanced reality (XR) and Flock XR — an innovative and kid-friendly 3D visual creativity and coding tool. LLM2FPGA aims to enable running open source LLMs locally on programmable chips ("FPGAs") using a fully open-source toolchain.
Podlibre is dedicated software to make podcasts, while PeerTube will make it easier for organisations to use the popular free, decentralized video-on-demand and live-streaming platform PeerTube — also enhancing its Livechat capablities to integrate public and private messaging capabilities.
The Open Terms Archive offers public tracking of the evolution of terms and conditions to facilitate democratic oversight. And that's just a small sample of the wide range of important contributions being worked on. Read on to meet all the projects selected in this funding round, or check out the complete overview of projects currently funded by NLnet.
If you applied for a grant
This is the selection for the October call of the NGI Zero Commons Fund only.
Meet the new projects!
Trustworthy hardware and manufacturing
- FuseSoc-compatible Web Catalog — A catalog of gateware that can be easily used with FuseSoC
- MNT Reform Touch — Open Hardware tablet device
- Solar FemtoTX motherboard with 802.3 cg Ethernet cards — Low-power motherboard that can run on solar power
- Tin Snipe DAQ — Digital Aquisition module
- USB 3 PHY implementation on GateMate FPGAs — USB 3 PHY implementation with Cologne Chip GateMate FPGA Transceiver
Operating Systems, firmware and virtualisation
- SSH Stamp — Secure SSH-to-UART bridge for devices with a serial port
- Ada Bootstrap Compiler — Full source bootstrap for Ada
- Bcachefs userspace integration — Next generation filesystem
- KDE Plasma Gestures — Advanced customisable gesture input on desktop and mobile
- LeanFTL — Flash Translation Layer library for embedded systems
- Maemo Leste Daedalus — Improve device coverage and advanced security for mobile Linux distro
- Reproducible Builds in the Scala ecosystem — Deterministic builds for software written in Scala
Measurement, monitoring, analysis and abuse handling
- Alaveteli GDPR and Search — Better search and redacting capabilities for Alaveteli FOI request portal
- Wiktionary QA tools — QA tools to improve the quality, reliability, and consistency of Wiktionary
- Clearance — Curating changes to OpenStreetMap data of interest
- Open Terms Archive vendor lock-in break — Public tracking of the evolution of terms and conditions
Middleware and identity
- Accessible KDE File Management — Accessible file dialogs throughout KDE applications
Decentralised solutions, including blockchain/distributed ledger
- Redwax Server Modernisation — Self-hostable X509 certificate based identity management solution
- Securing Internet protocols with decentralized identity — DIDs and Verified Credentials as SASL method
Data and AI
- Data Package implementation in TypeScript — Reference implementation of data definition language and data API
- Livebook — Robust and distributed data and ML workflows with Python, Elixir, and Livebook
- LLM2FPGA — Run Open Source LLMs locally on FPGAs
- PodOS — Personal Online Data Operating System aimed at exploring W3C Solid pods
Services + Applications (e.g. email, instant messaging, video chat, collaboration)
- Mobile Typst editor — Mobile editor/viewer for Typst documents
- Dino — User-friendly and secure instant messaging based on XMPP
- Podlibre — Dedicated, customizable podcast editor
- Signature PDF — PDF editing and server-based digital signing workflow
- Flock XR — 3D visual creativity and coding tool
- ClassQuiz — Libre quizing tool
- Federating pedagogical immersive experiences — Framework for playful learning content in enhanced reality
- Kaidan MUC + legacy OMEMO — Multi-user chat and improved legacy interoperability for Kaidan XMPP client
- LiberaForms — Self-hostable E2EE libre form server
- Modernizing Paged.js Web-to-Print — Quality typesetting based on HTML and CSS
- Peertube plugin livechat — Public and private messaging for Peertube content + live streams
- PeerTube for Institutions — Make PeerTube easier to manage and moderate at scale
- Repath Studio — SVG editor written in Clojurescript
- StreetComplete Multiplatform — OpenStreetMap editing beyond Android
Vertical use cases, Search, Community
- An OpenScience flavour of Bonfire on NixOS for preprints — Discuss preprints based on W3C ActivityPub federation
- cables.gl editor features — Create beautiful, interactive, visual web content
- MOTIS — European Public Transport Door to Door Real-Time Routing with MOTIS
- Open Terms Archive vendor lock-in break — Public tracking of the evolution of terms and conditions
- PodOS — Personal Online Data Operating System aimed at exploring W3C Solid pods
- Pushing forward for CSS Print — High end print from HTML and CSS
- XR Fragments Teamware — Design, deploy, federate and integrate portable XR experiences
Still hungry for more projects? Check out the overview of all our current and recent projects.
Inspired? If you are working on a project that contributes to the Next Generation Internet you can submit a proposal. The next deadline is June 1st.
Acknowledgements
The NGI0 Core fund is made possible with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet
programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology.