Open Call: NGI Fediversity Program (Third Edition)

Fediversity is a comprehensive effort to bring easy-to-use, hosted cloud services with service portability and personal freedom at their core to everyone. It wants to provide everyone with high-quality, secure IT systems for everyday use. Without tracking, without exploitation, in a way that runs everywhere and scales effortlessly.

Fediversity will deliver an ambitious development effort, but this is a vast domain with many more challenges than what any preconceived effort could tackle by itself. This is why they invite your contribution to help them reshape the state of play, and together create an open, trustworthy and reliable internet for all.

Fediversity is a pilot funded by the European Commission, building on many projects funding through the Next Generation Internet initiative. The results of the project should greatly simplify the creation and delivery of robust and secure services, on the web and beyond.

Funding Information

• The NGI Fediversity Consortium will competitively award €450,000 worth of grants (15% of its total budget) to independent researchers.
• You can apply only with proposals between 5,000 – 50,000 euro for this programme, 60,000 euro is the cumulative absolute hard limit for any applicant for the programme.

Eligible Activities

• The following types of activities qualify for financial support, provided they are cost effective and have a clear link to the topics directly relevant to Fediversity and the objectives set out in the call:
  • scientific research
  • design and development of free and open source software and open hardware
  • validation or constructive inquiry into existing or novel technical solutions
  • software engineering aimed at adapting to new usage areas or improving software quality
  • formal security proofs, security audits, setup and design of software testing and continuous integration
  • documentation for researchers, developers and end users, including educational materials
  • standardisation activities, including membership fees of standards bodies
  • understanding user requirements and improving usability/inclusive design
  • necessary measures in support of (broad)er deployability, e.g. packaging
  • participation in technical, developer and community events like hackathons, IETF, W3C, RIPE meetings, FOSDEM, etc. (admission fee, travel and subsistence costs)
  • other activities that are relevant to adhering to robust software development and deployment practices
  • project management
  • out-of-pocket costs for infrastructure essential to achieving the above.

Eligibility Criteria

• There are no categorical exclusions of persons who may not receive support from NGI Fediversity.
• Given equal proposals, inhabitants of the EU and countries associated to Horizon Europe are given priority, however if the project is of exceptional quality and the proposer holds unique technical expertise proposals from outside of those geographic areas can be eligible as well.
• Young people that have not yet reached the age of legal consent in their country of origin (typically 18 years old) on the date of the deadline may apply without any constraints; consent from a legal guardian such as a parent does not have to be provided prior to initial submission, but will be required to enter any further negotiations.

Judging Criteria

• Projects are judged on their technical merits, strategic relevance to the Next Generation Internet and the topics within Fediversity, and overall value for money. The key objective is to deliver potential break-through contributions to the open internet. All scientific outcomes must be published as open access, and any software and hardware must be published under a recognised open source license in its entirety.

For more information, visit European Commission.