Mastodawn

Hello from the EU Commission!

Dr. Monique Calisti kicking off Next Generation Internet Forum.

NGI continues for another year and half and then other Horizon Europe programs take over, I assume.

Agenda for the next 2 days: https://ngi.eu/ngi-forum25/

NGI Policy Summit will be happening 2025-11-20 in Brussels to discuss how investments will be allocated in the future.

(Be prepared for many moiré projector photos. The moiré is rainbow for #PrideMonth.)

https://openwallet.foundation/?ref=activitypub

Sean Bohan from OpenWallet Foundation now presenting on how he still believes in Mozilla’s old slogan: The Web we want.

3 potential futures for digital wallets:
1. One wallet to rule them all: This is bad.
2. Every wallet is an app: Also bad.
3. Wallets are like browsers: Use the best wallet app for you with interoperable credentials.

~“Free and open source software is permissionless innovation.” —Sean Bohan quoting his former manager

Sean Bohan: Regulators like to think “sovereignty” is their job. He’s having to explain to many people why individual digital sovereignty matters and is essential to privacy as a human right. Healthy debate happening between regulators and open source contributors demonstrating potential futures.

Jeremiah Lee

~“We started with a foundation. We then created a commercial spinoff—not a startup. We try to find clients, not venture capitalists.” —@jaromil, founder of @dyne

What do FOSS developers need?

Sean Bohan: We need better product marketing and more developer engagement. The closed-source world has many sales people and big marketing budgets. How do these FOSS projects get the word out about their great work and get into the room to talk to regulators when policy is being made?

~“Beware of hype. Do not step with funding into a hype cycle. Wait for the plateau or trough.” —@jaromil referring to the the Gartner Hype Cycle and the common pattern of government funding following innovation hype cycles rather than funding problem spaces

~“Open source is no longer enough. Open data is now essential consideration in the AI era.” —Pascal Steichen

If you were at the @EUCommission, what would be your next move?

Karin Lammers: Investigate why you use FOSS yourselves instead of US-based Big Tech.

@jaromil: Bring in more philosophers and scientists. Too many lawyers and engineers now.

What should be the moonshot goal for digital sovereignty for the people in this room?

Pascal: Not a fan of digital sovereignty positioning, but rather strategic autonomy. For people to have competence and capacity to secure their software and data.

Karin Lammers: For individuals and organizations to have choice in their tools and control of their data.

Sean Bohan: Sustainable funding for FOSS. British Colombia has good path forward.

Robbert Van Kranenburg: Bring NIST folks over

Delightfully unexpected #FediForum meetup in meatspace with @melaniebartos and @joanpla during the coffee break! Thinking of you, @j12t!

Panel on NGI impact stories from grantees

Martin Schanzenberger shared TalDir, enabling the "PayPal use case" for @Taler

@renchap shared quote posts and the decentralized content discovery features coming to @Mastodon

@ldubost shared how NGI funding brought stability to the funding for professional developers and credibility to @CryptPad

@kora shared Rosenpass.eu, a post-quantum-secure add-on for WireGuard

Ali Gonzalez shared @decidim to digitally engage citizens in governance

~”With NGI funding, we can invest time to bringing features to the ecosystem, rather than just our product.” — @renchap, repeatedly affirmed that Mastodon is just one part of the social web and the importance of interoperability

“I measure all software by its ability to support peace and democracy.” —@kora, answering their prior audience question about what the moonshot goal should be

FOSS scaling challenges:

@renchap: Scaling technology is easy. Scaling the other parts, like trust and safety, is hard. NGI funds the tech. Need to have funding for scaling other parts.

Ali Gonzalez: We are looking for public investment, not VC.

@ldubost: Goal is to grow product revenue alongside grant funding. One funds dev, one funds non-dev needs.

@kora: Need to ask where do we want to grow? When growth directions arent aligned with standard growth paths, funding can be hard.

Things stated by panelists as “not sexy” but essential for the digital commons:
• incorporating non-profit in the right EU country
• maintaining software dependencies
• writing documentation
• difficult cryptographic infrastructure
• act of content moderation

I just misheard “digital sovereignty” as “digital serenity” and I want that too.

Moderator, please add to the agenda.

~“Government needs to think about funding public infrastructure rather than funding innovation. We need to have a global vision about public procurement.” —Lukasz Klejnowski, Assistant to Member of the European Parliament Michał Kobosko

~“The EU is a unique region in the world because we collaborate and we share values across countries.

Sometimes we think, ‘We are lagging behind,’ and ‘How are we going to catch up?’

We strengthen a digital single market and find solutions for the longer term.”

—Isabelle Zablit Schmitz, international digital health expert

~“Tech monopolies were not made by innovation and they will not be broken by innovation funding.” —@robin

Lukasz Klejnowski: EU and member countries are making 2 mistakes: not funding FOSS and encouraging sustainable business models and then awarding public procurement to US big tech companies.

One thing that could help European players more than a requirement to “buy European” is to define interoperability requirements.

~“We need to think beyond open source and interoperability. They are necessary, but not sufficient. Open source solves one chokehold. Open standards solve chokehold of product lock-in. There are other chokeholds.

How about changing procurement rules to require a label that companies fund open source development granting foundations like @sovtechfund with a percentage of their EU revenue? It could be transitive to then affect the entire ecosystem.”

—@robin

~“We need an EU commissioner in charge of tech sovereignty. In a time of global crises and gatekeeper platforms, we don’t need vague platitudes about AI. We need strong leadership who understands the power of tech and can bend that power towards democracy. They need convening power to bring people together to work on the components. These initiatives should be driven by society, not top down. People want to work on this all over, but there is no where to go to do this work.” —@robin

~“Sovereignty is not about protectionism, but standing in your own strength.” —Thibaut Kleiner, Director at Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DG Connect)

While hearing the EU Commission’s perspective is useful, this is a room where the Commission should be listening more than talking.

I would like to have heard how the experts in the room could better engage with the Commission in influencing policy.

Most of the insights from the morning’s panel discussions were not reflected in the strategy outline shared. Commercialization and AI were not mentioned by those experts as top challenges.