Eleven new projects for NGI Pilots
We are delighted to welcome on board eleven free and open source projects that will contribute to the three NGI Pilot programmes. These pilot programmes each focus on a specific domain: NGI Taler works on privacy-preserving digital payments, NGI Fediversity builds the hosting stack of the future and NGI Mobifree is liberating the mobile landscape. Each pilot has dedicated part of its budget — kindly provided by the European Commission — for supporting smaller projects that contribute to these goals. Anyone can apply with a proposal to make their own meaningful contribution to the topics the pilots address. Allow us to to introduce the eleven new projects that will be supporting these three pilot programmes.
Mobile freedom
F-Droid App Overhaul will be modernizing and rewriting the official F-Droid app that still dates back to the early days of Android in 2009. The goal is to make the app easier to use and more appealing especially for new users. FindMyDevice is a decentralised solution to allow you to locate and remotely control your Android device, without depending on any privacy-invasive third party services. Unexpected Keyboard allows for more pleasant and more efficient keyboard input than the stock Android. Solid Digital Wallet will make it easier for mobile apps to use W3C Solid. VoWiFi Watchdog exposes geoblocking measures and deprecated security settings with mobile providers, so that mobile users better understand which provider to avoid. These projects are all part of NGI Mobifree, a programme that is creating more ethical and humane mobile software for the Android ecosystem.
Privacy preserving payments with GNU Taler
NGI Taler is working on an electronic payment system that offers privacy for those that make payments, while enforcing transparency on those that sell. The projects joining the ranks of NGI Taler are Taler-Dolibarr Integration, Contributron, xBSD porting and packaging and TalerPHP. As the name already subtly hints at, Taler-Dolibarr Integration will provide a comprehensive module to integrate the privacy-preserving payment system GNU Taler with Dolibarr, an open-source Enterprise Resource Planning used by many small businesses around the world. This includes a LibEuFin-oriented module which should provide seamless bank account integration. Contributron delivers a self-hostable personal website to collect donations and track crowd-funding efforts on various external platforms, including one-time and recurring donations. xBSD porting and packaging will make sure that the entire Taler software stack is natively available on a number of operating systems beyond the already available (and obviously popular) Linux operating system — NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and Apple's MacOS X. TalerPHP will develop an open-source PHP library to interact with GNU Taler’s REST APIs, enabling PHP-based applications to more easily support privacy-preserving payments. The project will deliver a framework-agnostic core SDK, followed by dedicated packages for Laravel, Symfony, and Yii - lowering the technical barrier for adoption.
Rock solid hosting-in-a-box
NGI Fediversity is a comprehensive effort to bring easy-to-use, hosted cloud services with service portability and personal freedom at their core to everyone. bewCloud is a nimble self-hosted cloud storage and collaboration platform offering efficient shared file storage and groupware. BewCloud's goal is to allow anyone to run their own personal private cloud software on cheap devices. SelfPrivacy Catalog will extend SelfPrivacy, a free software solution that helps you set up and manage your self-hosted services directly from a mobile app — providing an alternative mechanism to Fediversity's hosting stack.
If you applied for a grant
This is the selection for the December 2024 and February 2025 calls, and only for the pilot programmes (NGI Taler, NGI Fediversity and Mobifree). We always inform all applicants about the outcome of the review ahead of the public announcement, whether they are selected or not. If you have not heard anything, you probably applied to a later call or a different fund such as NGI Zero Commons Fund. Later calls and the other funds are still under review. You can see which call you applied to by checking the application number assigned to the project when you applied. The second number in the sequence refers to the month of the call, so for instance "04" in the case of the April (2025) call. (It should not happen, but if you did apply to one of these calls and did not hear anything, do contact us)
Inspired? If you are working on a project that contributes to the Next Generation Internet you can submit a proposal. The next deadline is June 1st.
Acknowledgements
The NGI pilot programmes NGI Taler, NGI Fediversity and NGI Mobifree are possible with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology.
