Michiel Leenaars

The Next Generation Internet initiative is the first concerted effort in Europe to put significant public funding to hands-on work to really fix the internet. The long term vision of the initiative is to make the internet what we need and expected it to be in the first place: Resilient. Trustworthy. Sustainable. The concrete mission of the Next Generation Internet initiative is to "re-imagine and re-engineer the Internet for the third millennium and beyond". With new projects starting all the time, the density of awesome open source, open hardware, new science and new standards in-the-making is already intense: about 200 projects are currently on their way. These range from encrypted synchronisation for calendars and address books to symbolical protocol verification, from an open hardware RISC-V SoC to removing binary seeds from operating systems, from ethical search to the Fediverse etc.

NGI Zero offers funding to independent researchers and FOSS developers working on free and open projects in the area of privacy and trust enhancing technologies and on search, discovery and discoverability. It also offers an elaborate 'pipeline' of supporting activities that live up to high standards (sometimes called 'walk the talk') in terms of security, privacy, accessibility, open source licensing, standardisation, packaging, etc. The talk will provide an overview of the awesome R&D that is now in the pipeline, how these projects are supported, and everything you need to know about the various opportunities to 'come and work for the internet'.

NGI Zero Discovery and NGI Zero PET are a significant effort and ambitious effort by a large group of organisations led by NLnet foundation (that was instrumental in pioneering the early internet in Europe):

• Accessibility Foundation - Center of expertise on accessibility of internet and other digital media for all people, including the elderly and people with disabilities
• Association for Progressive Communications - A global network and organisation that strives towards easy and affordable access to a free and open internet to improve the lives of people and create a more just world
• Center for the Cultivation of Technology - A charitable non-profit host organization for international Free Software projects
• Commons Caretakers - A not-for-profit service provider for the development of Commons
• Network Security Group of Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich - Academic research institute focused on building secure and robust network systems
• Free Software Foundation Europe - Association charity that aims to empower users to control technology.
• ifrOSS - Provides not-for-profit legal services and studies in the context of free and open source software
• NixOS Foundation - Foundation supporting development and use of purely functional configuration management tools, in particular NixOS and related projects
• NLnet Foundation (NL) - Grantmaking public benefit organisation founded by pioneers of the early European internet
• Petites Singularités - Non profit organisation working with free sofware and focusing on collective practices
• Radically Open Security - Not-for-profit open source security company
• TIMIT - Experts in secure software
• Translate House - Develops and implements open source localization solutions

The budget for the effort is kindly provided by the European Commission.

The Next Generation Internet initiative is one of the most substantial efforts in recent years to move the state of technology forward. It consists currently of over 200 projects, ranging from open hardware, middleware, web services, ActivityPub and cryptography to more fair search technology and decentralised internet tools. More projects are being added through open calls regularly. There are some twenty different talks related to this programme at FOSDEM 2020! This Birds of a Feather is for anyone interested in or involved with the Next Generation Internet initiative.

The Next Generation Internet initiative is the first concerted effort in Europe to put significant public funding to hands-on work to really fix the internet. The long term vision of the initiative is to make the internet what we need and expected it to be in the first place: Resilient. Trustworthy. Sustainable. The concrete mission of the Next Generation Internet initiative is to "re-imagine and re-engineer the Internet for the third millennium and beyond". With new projects starting all the time, the density of awesome open source, open hardware, new science and new standards in-the-making is already intense: about 200 projects are currently on their way. These range from encrypted synchronisation for calendars and address books to symbolical protocol verification, from an open hardware RISC-V SoC to removing binary seeds from operating systems, from ethical search to the Fediverse etc.

NGI Zero offers funding to independent researchers and FOSS developers working on free and open projects in the area of privacy and trust enhancing technologies and on search, discovery and discoverability. It also offers an elaborate 'pipeline' of supporting activities that live up to high standards (sometimes called 'walk the talk') in terms of security, privacy, accessibility, open source licensing, standardisation, packaging, etc. The talk will provide an overview of the awesome R&D that is now in the pipeline, how the programme is organised and everything you need to know about the various opportunities to 'come and work for the internet'.

NGI Zero Discovery and NGI Zero PET are a significant effort and ambitious effort by a large group of organisations led by NLnet foundation (that was instrumental in pioneering the early internet in Europe):

• Accessibility Foundation - Center of expertise on accessibility of internet and other digital media for all people, including the elderly and people with disabilities
• Association for Progressive Communications - A global network and organisation that strives towards easy and affordable access to a free and open internet to improve the lives of people and create a more just world
• Center for the Cultivation of Technology - A charitable non-profit host organization for international Free Software projects
• Commons Caretakers - A not-for-profit service provider for the development of Commons
• Network Security Group of Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich - Academic research institute focused on building secure and robust network systems
• Free Software Foundation Europe - Association charity that aims to empower users to control technology.
• ifrOSS - Provides not-for-profit legal services and studies in the context of free and open source software
• NixOS Foundation - Foundation supporting development and use of purely functional configuration management tools, in particular NixOS and related projects
• NLnet Foundation (NL) - Grantmaking public benefit organisation founded by pioneers of the early European internet
• Petites Singularités - Non profit organisation working with free sofware and focusing on collective practices
• Radically Open Security - Not-for-profit open source security company
• TIMIT - Experts in secure software
• Translate House - Develops and implements open source localization solutions

The budget for the effort is kindly provided by the European Commission.

Last year during a FOSDEM keynote Michiel Leenaars, director of strategy at NLnet foundation, introduced the Next Generation Internet initiative together with member of the European parliament Marietje Schaake. NGI aims to be the first concerted effort to put significant public funding to hands-on work to really fix the internet. Meanwhile, the project is on its way. On December 1st 2018, the first open calls opened with funding for independent researchers and developers working on free and open source projects in the area of privacy and trust enhancing technologies and on search, discovery and discoverability. In this talk Leenaars, project lead of NGI Zero that is currently offering 11.2 million euro in grants, will tell everything you need to know about the various open calls that you can apply for. With grants ranging from 5.000 euro to 50.000 euro available for research, development and engineering effort NGI Zero aims to lead the push toward the post-Snowden internet we want.

From the humble four nodes of the ARPANET that were bootstrapped half a century ago this year, until today, the internet has grown at a breathtaking pace. But while the technology has gradually penetrated every aspect of our lives, it has become clear that not all is well and at least some part of its growth has spiraled out of control. In fact, web inventor Tim Berners-Lee has recently called the current state of his creation (and by extension the larger internet) "dystopian".

The internet of especially the last fifteen years has brought about undesirable concentration of power ("winner takes all"), and while it has given us many good things has also caused loss of human agency in many other realms. Internet has given the world totalitarianism the likes of which it has never seen, has enabled political manipulation at unprecedented scale affection the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Internet has eroded the private sphere to the point where it has been declared dead, and the mantra of 'big data' and business analytics frame the discussion we should be having. Due to its open global nature and the wholly new types of economic dominance neither internet users nor governments both have an adequate answer against dominant super-actors. How dow we stop large scale abuse of power. Have the web and the internet become "anti-human" as Berners-Lee posits? And what can we do about it?

The internet is not going to fix itself. Many of the more promising efforts in this realm have been 'bottom up' efforts from individuals or small teams, but these isolated efforts certainly have missed critical mass to actually scale up and change the mainstream internet and the commercial landscape where powerful actors are fully vested in the current course. The Next Generation Internet initiative aims to bring those efforts together, strengthen and unite them and turn them into something that can be deployed across the whole internet. Let there be no doubt about it: fixing the internet is an insane 'moonshot++' effort: the internet is the largest technical structure man has ever made, and the task at hand is to vastly improve its very operating fabric with > 3 billion people using it on a daily basis.

And yet we have to: fixing the internet is essential to safeguard our economy and create a more resilient and robust infrastructure. And even more importantly we also depend on it to upholding our way of life. How the internet, the web and the mobile ecosystems work directly impacts our human values. Crafting a better internet is essential for maintaining basic human rights such as privacy for the near-future Europe.

Surely, a larger political agenda of Europe should be an integral part of the approach - in some cases regulating the most predatory behaviour from bad actors might be the only thing left to put the genie back in the bottle and to restore health back to the internet. However, it is also clear that a significant part of the solution lies in the hands of technologists. NGI Zero is probably the first funding programme of its scale that is entirely based on the principles of free/libre, open source software. We need smart and resourceful people that come and work for the internet. Could this be you? In this talk Michiel Leenaars will explain how the funding works, and how NGI Zero deals with important issues like localisation, accessibility, security, packaging, documentation, responsible disclosure and more. Come and work for the internet too!

The new Next Generation Internet initiative could be the first real opportunity to put large scale public funding to work to really fix the internet. With an order of magnitude of hundreds of millions of euro in research, development and engineering effort it can actually be a major step toward reaching the post-Snowden internet we want. NLnet Foundation and Gartner Europe that wrote the strategic vision for the Next Generation Internet initiative will present the work they did in a unique collaboration which sought the expertise of key organisations and communities in the field - like RIPE (the European regional internet registry), GÉANT (research networks), the European assocation of country domain name organisations, ISP associations, the internet exchanges, the open source community (FSFE), the digital civil rights community (EDRi) and Internet Society. So not just the separate communities that operate different 'layers' (or rather slices) of the technology but also what we consider 'ethical guardians' of the internet.

2018 celebrates the fifth anniversary of the Edward Snowden revelations. Full details about covert mass scale surveillance at internet scale stripped the internet naked of every romantic assumption we held about it. The news sent a transformative shock throughout the global technology community. We were all convinced the internet would soon fix these horrible security shortcomings now that we knew - although naivity was destroyed and the internet would never be the same again.

The world has fast forwarded itself five years. We must conclude - with some sadness - that the internet was not fixed for us. We are still waiting for major structural change. To the regular end user, a safe and secure 'post-Snowden' internet is far away: in day to day usage they still by and large have to use the same unfixed and insecure internet we had before.

In fact, things in some areas have gotten worse as other actors besides foreign state agencies have gained immense powers over us. We are now asked by social networks to turn all our nude pictures over to them voluntarily so they may protect us.

One reason for this sad state of affairs, is that it has take time to follow up the Snowden revelations by adequate political measures. And to be frank, it took a while for public funding organisations in Europe to even understand their crucial role in this. The internet is not going to fix itself. Many of the more promising efforts in this realm have been 'bottom up' efforts from individuals or small teams, but these isolated efforts miss critical mass to actually scale up and change the mainstream internet.

The new Next Generation Internet initiative could be the first real opportunity to put large scale public funding to work to really fix the internet. With an order of magnitude of hundreds of millions of euro in research, development and engineering effort it can actually potentially change the balance of power. The Europen Commission (where the money for NGI originates) did not try to invent such a strategy by: it invited NLnet Foundation and Gartner Europe to write a strategic vision for the Next Generation Internet and identify what needs to be done to really move the internet forward. NLnet Foundation is an independent public benefit organisation which was set up by pioneers of the European internet in the eighties, and which has been funding key open source initiatives for over two decades. Gartner Europe is an equally independent consulting company that knows what is being decided in board rooms before anyone else.

In a unique collaboration they sought the expertise of key organisations and communities in the field - like RIPE (the European regional internet registry), GÉANT (research networks), the European assocation of country domain name organisations, ISP associations, the internet exchanges, the open source community (FSFE), the digital civil rights community (EDRi) and Internet Society. So not just the separate communities that operate different 'layers' (or rather slices) of the technology but also what we consider 'ethical guardians' of the internet.

The NGI initiative has learned from the enormous failures of the past five years. Gone will be the need to create artificial consortia. Gone will be a lot of the bureaucratic paperwork. There is a clear vision. There is a plan. And there is money to fund the right things. Open source is seen as the key mechanism to make it actually happen, and the first calls for funding from the NGI initiative are out. Now what is needed is the developers to seize the opportunity to scale up and more importantly to connect their initiatives.

Fixing the internet is a 'moonshot plus' effort: the internet is the largest technical structure man has ever made, and the task at hand is to vastly improve its very operating fabric with 3 billion + people using it on a daily basis. This may essential to our daily operations, but it is equally or even more important for upholding our human values and basic human rights in Europe. In addition to new open source technology this will also require a larger political agenda of Europe as an integral part of the approach too - in some cases regulating the most predatory behaviour from bad actors might be necessary to restore health back to the internet.

As a FOSS/OSHW project grows, at some stage it often reaches a point where it requires a legal entity for better operation – whether this be to gather donations, pay for development, handle finances, organise events, consolidate rights, better governance or other reasons. So far in Europe there were no alternatives to setting up your own legal entity, and with it a huge tonne of work and obligations.

But finally three host/umbrella organisations have just emerged in Europe and aim to offload this overhead from your projects.

Join our panel to learn if and which of these organisations could help your project flourish best, as well as pose any open questions or concerns you may still have.

Panelists include

• Simon Phipps, Founder of Public Software CIC
• Michiel Leenaars, Chairman of The Commons Conservancy
• Moritz Bartl, CTO of Center for the Cultivation of Technology
• Karen Sandler, Executive Director of the Software Freedom Conservancy