I will attend the Next Generation Internet Forum in Brussels on Thursday and Friday.
This event is part of the @EUCommission’s Horizon Europe program, which probably has funded more free and open source software development than any other government program.
The next grant program framing is bizarre—Virtual Worlds and Web 4.0—but €14.5M available for “Open Internet Stack” dev.
Follow or mute this thread according to your interest.
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.)
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.
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.”
~“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.
The EU does not need more unicorns. We need to commoditize proprietary advantages and balance markets.
~“Maintenance funding for open source software is not getting enough attention. It doesn’t sound exciting as innovation funding. It’s not new and shiny. Funding consortiums need to treat open source as public infrastructure and set up funding that addresses it in that way.” —@senficon
So much of what people praise the Next Generation Internet program can be attributed to @nlnet’s grant program design.
As @michiel noted, NLnet took public grant money beyond the typical institutions and consortiums that could apply for it and made it accessible to the individual experts and small teams actually doing the work regardless of where they live in the world. These grants likely have outperformed all other EU tech funding in terms of return-on-investment.
We need a new rule for panel discussions: 300 word limit and then another person gets to speak.
Vote up my Q&A question: We heard Director Kleiner start this section with the Commission’s priorities for this community. Since he’s here now, what is 1 priority you have as experts that wasn’t mentioned that you would like the Commission to consider?
A panel on open infrastructure started.
Nina Müller from @nextcloud shared how businesses can more easily operate a server they own that provides most of their business software needs.
Nicola Rustignoli represents the SCION, a protocol for routing network traffic only thru trusted paths. https://www.scion.org/about-scion/?ref=activitypub
Quentin Adam from Clever Cloud started with bold, controversial claim that it cannot be fully open source and have a sustainable business… Sir, that’s vendor lockin.
Ok, I’m done with the Clever Cloud guy on this panel after his declaration that free and open source is free as in speech, but not beer.
Brand awareness of non-US-based cloud service providers is low, so let’s make finding local vendors easier.
I started the https://www.eucloud.tech/ wiki years ago when I was CTO of a Svenska e-bike manufacturer and needed to find EU-based cloud service providers.
@utopiah just went full stack in his intro describing the commercially viable free and open source products he used today. Nice anecdata counter to the perception that FOSS is only good for infrastructure or components.
Niko Bonnieure (@nextgraph):
• Interoperability is a component of usability. It’s not only a problem for proprietary software. Open source solutions lose when they require complex configuration.
• We need symmetric Internet connections (equal upload and download connectivity). To increase ownership of data on devices we own, people will do more uploading. Limited upload connectivity hurts the UX of peer-to-peer solutions.
Related: The EU needs to accelerate IPv6 adoption.
Day 2 kicked off with focus on EU’s ambition to have its own search engine.
Search is critical Internet infrastructure. ~“What if Europe only had 2 newspapers?” —@grani
Technically, search engines require a large amount storage and compute. They also require ongoing human infrastructure for ML refinement, operation, legal.
I am not sure how this can be done in a federated way, but @openwebsearcheu is trying.
@openwebsearcheu’s first step in creating a search engine has been indexing the web: crawling the web, reducing the HTML from exabytes to petabytes, then to terabyte slices that are distributed.
The equivalent to Google/Bing webmaster tools for info on its crawl of your site: https://openwebindex.eu/websites/www.jeremiahlee.com?ref=activitypub
Michael Granitzer: Distributing a web index is a legal challenge. Over 80 laws across the EU related to content legality, copyright, AI, and others. Currently, data is only distributed under a research license, so no commercial use of the data is possible at the moment.
European Parliamentarian @alexandrageese examined the US far right’s “attack on knowledge”. She warned about the "industrial censorship complex" false narrative being used to attack freedom of speech.
Article 34 of DSA can help counter, but better option would be for more EU-based tech infrastructure and less dependence on the US Big Tech companies whose leaders have kissed Trump’s ring.
European Parliamentarian @alexandrageese:
We don’t want a "European Google". We want a independent, federation of viable alternatives to Google.
Audience question: How would an EU-infrastructure search engine answer a question like "how safe is nuclear energy" when within the EU, DE opposes it and FR supports it?
@alexandrageese: The job of a search engine is not to answer the question. The job is to surface information—scientifically validated and information following journalism ethics—so that people can answer the question themselves.
~“Don’t say ‘federated’. It’s good, but people are already lost when you say that word.” —@alexandrageese
Me: “social web” > “fediverse”
@Jeremiah @alexandrageese good illustration of the problem, that the current vertical crew are pushing AI as it's about control - they hid this by pushing the usual #stupidindividualism stories and fund this story hardcore... it's just more #techshit to compost.
I feel the is likely a whole class of people who need to be prosecuted for fraud... yes a bit spiky, but by pushing this into view we might mediate the mess these mainstreaming crew push and fund.
@Jeremiah word.
I mean words.
I highly recommend watching this discussion about Europe’s role and responsibilities in open source sustainability and how to level-up the #maintenance of the critical software our society relies on.
Speakers:
Adriana Groh – CEO, @sovtechfund Tech Agency
@astornc – Executive Director, @OpenForumEurope
Bravo to DG Connect Director Thibaut Kleiner for staying the whole day to listen to the panels, meet with people during breaks, and recap what he heard.
He reassured the room that there will be more opportunities for public funding, even as the NGI program ends.
Jeremiah Lee
hamish campbell
Michael Granitzer
Otte Homan - remember Geordie
John 🎵
Werawelt
Probabilita
samvie