From Paula Grzegorzewska at OFE: The Next Generation Internet initiative opened several funding calls supporting open source solutions in the EU. The grants are fairly small, but there is a scale up possibility.
The Next Generation Internet (NGI) is a European Commission initiative that aims to shape the development and evolution of the Internet that responds to people’s fundamental needs, including trust, security, and inclusion, while reflecting the values and the norms all citizens enjoy in Europe.
Initial EC investment in NGI research and innovation of more than €250m (2018-2020) has already supported around 1,000 Internet researchers and innovators involved in many hundreds of projects.
Here is a rundown of the open calls, you can read more here.
- NGI Zero Entrust (deadline: 1st of August 2023), 9.6 million euro in small to medium-size R&D grants towards privacy and trust enhancing technologies,
- NGI Zero Core (deadline: 1st of August 2023) for innovative open source solutions
- NGI TrustChain (deadline: 10th of April 2023), € 1,755,000 will be distributed among up to 15 projects along with free coaching and access to infrastructure, focus on trustworthy digital identities and data,
- NGI Zero Review, supporting quality and maturity of digital commons - open only to projects that received an NGI grant.
- NGI OpenWebSearch.eu (deadline: 28th of April 2023), building and piloting a legally compliant Open Web Index as a European infrastructure.
- NGI SEARCH Support Programme (deadline: 1st of June 2023), for trusted open source search and discovery tools