Welcome to NLnet Foundation
When it comes to important ideas that can help improve our society, there really are no boundaries. The challenge is to turn those opportunities into reality. Great ideas just come, but they are gone in a breeze as well. Lets make good use of them.
Since 1997 NLnet foundation (after its historical contribution to the early internet in Europe) has been financially supporting organizations and people that contribute to an open information society. It funds those with ideas to fix the internet. The procedure is fast, competitive and open to anyone.
NLnet has contributed funding to many important and very visible projects around fundamental standards from securing the core routing protocols and the domain name system of the internet to safer email, vendor-independent videoconferencing, more reliable wireless networks and private instant messaging - all based on open standards and verifiable open source software and/or hardware. It spawned the world-renowned NLnet Labs, and supported great open source projects like Jitsi, ARPA2, WireGuard, NoScript, Tor Hidden Services, GPLv3, GNUnet, and webODF. And many more ....
Do you have a great idea?
Find out what NLnet can do for you.
What is perhaps most amazing about this all is the size of NLnet. NLnet does not have huge budgets compared to the awesome work that it facilitates. The foundation's current funding comes from donations, legacies, collaborative funding and subgranting mechanisms, after having been kickstarted by a substantial capital established by pioneers of the European internet. NLnet itself at the time was the very first Dutch Internet Service Provider, and transitioned into a recognised public benefit organisation in 1997. The articles of association for the NLnet foundation state: "to promote the exchange of electronic information and all that is related or beneficial to that purpose".
If you are interested in learning about new technology that respects your privacy and helps to make you and everyone else more secure on the internet - take some time to browse through the many awesome projects we are currently supporting. There is an entire parallel world to discover that ranges from videoconferencing applications, collaborative editors, alternative search engines, social networks, reproducible software tooling, vpn technologies, and secure messaging - all the way up to open hardware laptops, smartphones and dumbphones, fully transparent computer chips, new internet routing mechanisms, alternative web browsers, operating systems and even entire mobile networks and satellites.
Check out our current projects...
NGI Assure funds free and open source technological building blocks that can provides strong assurances to internet users on what they interact with online - from cryptography, public key infrastructure, distributed hash tables, CRDT's, symbolic and formal proofs, reputation and key exchange mechanisms.
More about NGI Assure
Apply now!
The User Operated Internet Fund supports free and open source efforts that empower users to take ownership and control of the technology they depend on - from software applications that can be self-hosted, protocols that promote freedom of choice and interoperability to open hardware devices that are trustworthy from the bottom up - we believe that tomorrow's internet is a future we should be working on today.
More about User Operated Internet Fund
Apply now!
The two current NGI Zero programmes are due to end October 2022 and are currently fully allocated, which means they can unfortunately no longer harbour new applications. But of course nearly three hundred amazing projects funded through NGI Zero are still under way, and you can propose to other themes or through the open call.
NGI Zero Discovery is a grant programme that funds R&D that allows people, objects, content, data, applications and services to be found online - by improving search, discovery and discoverability through free and open source tools (like Searx, Yacy and Nominatim, Open Data (like OpenFoodFacts, Wikirate and Software Heritage), implements open standards like ActivityPub, XQuery, microformats and LinkedData.
More about NGI Zero Discovery
NGI Zero PET is aimed at efforts that enhance privacy characteristics and trustworthiness of the technology we depend on. From the internet protocols that run underneath every packet sent, the operating system and browser that we run our applications on, the chips we use in every device, to even the design and manufacturing of silicon - projects within NGI Zero PET are breaking down barriers and working towards a technology commons.
More about NGI Zero PET
