NGI FEDIVERSITY has announced its 11th Open Call, open for the submission of proposals.

Fediversity is a pilot funded by the European Commission, building on many projects funding through the Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative.

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. Fediversity is based on NixOS, a disruptive Linux distribution with a unique approach to package and configuration management. Built on top of the Nix package manager, NixOS is completely declarative, makes upgrading systems reliable, and has many other advantages.

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 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;
• 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.

Project results must be made available under a free and open source license, so anyone can read and validate the source code, and anyone can use the code to create technology that fits their own purposes.