NGI Zero Discovery

The NGI vision clearly identifies major social and economic challenges that need to be addressed urgently, and articulates a powerful vision for a new phase of the internet. It tries to create an Internet of Human Values, that is resilient, trustworthy and sustainable. The overall mission of the Next Generation Internet initiative is to re-imagine and re-engineer the Internet for the third millennium and beyond. NGI Zero Discovery aims to provide an agile, effective and low-threshold funding mechanism to enable individual researchers and developers as well as small teams to research and develop important new ideas that contribute to the establishment of the Next Generation Internet. We build on decades of experience to allow clueful and committed people to focus on delivering solutions to important problems. Unique to our project is that - built on that experience - we will provide a greenhouse environment for the projects and teams that are funded within NGI. Researchers and developers are human too, and the grasp of all relevant best practises they bring along initially is necessarily limited. The demands on technology that should actually run at scale on the modern internet today are huge, and continuously changing. Having the right idea does not automatically mean that you know how to make your solution accessible to blind people, how to set up continuous integration and reproducible builds, how to orchestrate a responsible disclosure procedure, how to make sure that your application can be used with different languages and properly localised, how to engineer secure software and what state of the art attack vectors you would have deal with, how to engage with standards setting organisations, how to nurture and grow a developer community, how to write end user documentation, which software license best fits the goals of the project, how to not discourage gender identity diversity, and so on. We help people work towards achieving the NGI Vision - all of it.