Calls: Send in your ideas. Deadline April 1, 2024

Community Programs

Support for advancing research and development internet communities

This page contains a concise overview of projects funded by NLnet foundation that belong to Community Programs (see the thematic index). There is more information available on each of the projects listed on this page - all you need to do is click on the title or the link at the bottom of the section on each project to read more. If a description on this page is a bit technical and terse, don't despair — the dedicated page will have a more user-friendly description that should be intelligible for 'normal' people as well. If you cannot find a specific project you are looking for, please check the alphabetic index or just search for it (or search for a specific keyword).

GDPR Compliance — Support instruments for the country adoption of the GDPR

In 2016, the European Parliament passed the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It will be the harmonised framework, which will establish the rules regarding the protection of personal data in all European countries. Although the GDPR is directly applicable without needing any law implementing it on national levels, the majority of countries will need to go through a period of adaptation in which the interpretations of the key issues in practice will be crucial (https://edri.org/analysis-flexibilities-gdpr/).

EDRi will provide a series of material, such as a checklist, a technical tool and a set of research papers, to advise Europe's countries on how to translate consent, profiling, access to your data, etc. in practical terms.

>> Read more about GDPR Compliance

Bits of Freedom — support for Bits of Freedom

Bits of Freedom is a privacy and digital rights organisation. Major topics of concern to Bits of Freedom are copyright, the balance between law enforcement and privacy, freedom of speech, and spam.

Bits of Freedom is a not-for-profit organisation based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. BOF organises both public and closed events to promote its ideas, often in collaboration with other organisations. Amongst the events BOF organises is the annual presentation of the Big Brother Awards.

>> Read more about Bits of Freedom

CAcert — support for CAcert

CAcert, Inc., is a non-profit community-oriented Certificate Authority that provides a general service to the community by issuing, where possible, free X.509(v3) certificates for personal and/or server-side use. CAcert services the Open Source digital certificate security needs of users across six continents. Certificates issued by the nonprofit CA form the foundation for many server-side (web) and personal (email) security implementations.

>> Read more about CAcert

CAIEC — Investigate information offered by consumer organisations

This project concerns investigation of the structure of the information offered to the Dutch consumer by consumer organisations.

In the first phase of this project, the team will conduct research on the strategy of the Dutch consumer organisation Consumentenbond and their implementation thereof.

In the next phase, recommendations how to change this strategy will be worked out. In the last phase, these recommendations will be presented to Consumentenbond.

>> Read more about CAIEC

The Commons Conservancy — Legal infrastructure for public benefit efforts

[The Commons Conservancy] is an initiative to provide a lightweight organisational structure for open project. Its mission is to strive towards a stable democratic and open global information society in which individuals can collectively scrutinise, reconfigure and improve upon any technology they depend on - unleashing and empowering human innovation at the widest possible scale, with the express intention to empower any individual to participate in all facets of social, cultural, economic and private life under conditions of his or her own choosing and with secure and reliable technology they can have full control over themselves.

>> Read more about The Commons Conservancy

Donations — smaller contributions to various activities

Besides the larger support activities and donations, NLnet also helps-out small projects. Since 2005, they got grouped on this page.

>> Read more about Donations

FFII — support for the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure

The FFII is a non-profit organisation with branches in various European countries. FFII concentrates on the spread of data processing literacy. They support the development of public information products based on copyright, free competition, and open standards.

In daily practice, FFII is the driving force of the movement which fights against the legalisation of software patents in the European legislation. This means in practice: active lobbying in the European administration in Brussels (in particular the European Parliament), distributing lots of information and press releases, and organising conferences and demonstrations (both physically and on the web).

>> Read more about FFII

FLOSS — Stimulating FLOSS dissemination in The Netherlands

The promotion of FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open-Source Software) in The Netherlands needs people. This project will educate FLOSS ambassadors who will disseminate open source philosophy and methods amongst non-profit organisations, SME's and local governments.

Volunteers will become ambassadors, trained in the essence of Open Source principles and technology. Communication techniques will be taught to help contact a peer group of NGO's, SME's, and local governments.

>> Read more about FLOSS

FSF — support for the Free Software Foundation

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is the principal organizational sponsor of the GNU Project. FSF relies on voluntary support from individuals, organizations and companies who support FSF's mission to preserve, protect and promote the freedom to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer software, and to defend the rights of Free Software users.

>> Read more about FSF

FSF Europe — support for the Free Software Foundation Europe

The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSF Europe) is a charitable non-governmental organization dedicated to all aspects of Free Software in Europe. Access to software determines who may participate in a digital society. Therefore the freedoms to use, copy, modify and redistribute software - as described in the Free Software definition - allow equal participation in the information age.

The FSF Europe works towards all European aspects of Free Software and especially the GNU Project. It is actively supporting development of Free Software and furthering GNU-based systems, such as GNU/Linux. Also, it provides a competence center for politicians, lawyers and journalists in order to secure the legal, political and social future of Free Software.

The NLnet Foundation is stimulating efforts made by FSF Europe to adapt and embed Free Software licenses, like GPL, LGPL, and FDL in the European legal system(s). Besides, NLnet supports the Freedom Task Force, which provides licensing services to individuals, projects and businesses involved with Free Software.

>> Read more about FSF Europe

GPLv3 — GNU Public Licence v3 Development and Publicity Project

The creation of GPL version 3 brought together thousands of organizations, software developers, and software users from around the globe, in an effort to update the worlds most popular Free Software license. The GPLv3 was one of the largest participatory comments and adoption efforts ever undertaken.

On June 29th 2007, the GPL and LGPL version 3 documents were released in their final version.

>> Read more about GPLv3

HWIOS — Hybrid Web In OpenSim (HWIOS)

The HWIOS project (Hybrid Web In OpenSim) is meant to create an accessible interface to the popular and most developed virtual world platform called OpenSimulator. One of the main problems of OpenSimulator is that it's too technical for people who want to perform basic operations within this virtual world platform.

Compared to the existing or being developed tools like wiredux, gridmix, unga, the HWIOS tool has decentralized service management through osservices (sideproject of hwios), it's page-refresh-less (preperation for gwave kind functionality), it's very liberally licensed (bsd license), it has tms map support through osmaps (sideproject of hwios), and it's well structured.

The hybrid web interface communicates directly with OpenSimulator server, and is thus able to hide the most of the complexity of admin tasks, and therefor makes most admin tasks easier for less technically oriented user.

Besides administrative tasks like user-, service- and land-management, HWIOS is meant to become a general-use next-gen webportal with virtual world support. The whole web application doesn't use page refreshing (html over json transport), and is strongly focussed on supporting html5 features, like collaborative text editing through web sockets. It is not concerned about backwards compatibility with older browsers, but will only support the most current html5 featured browsers (chromium and shortly Firefox).

It's build on top of tools like Python, Django, Twisted and JQuery. This project is being co-financed by SurfNet.

>> Read more about HWIOS

MAPS — defending Internet e-mail from abuse by spammers

MAPS is a service to limit the transport of known-to-be-unwanted mass e-mail based on the address of the sending MTA (Mail Transfer Agent).

>> Read more about MAPS

OpenDoc-Soc — Dutch OpenDoc Society

The aim of this project, is to initiate the Dutch OpenDoc Society which actively promotes the use of ODF -and other Open Standards- to existing organisations, like government, health care, and educational institutes.

>> Read more about OpenDoc-Soc

ReX — international exchange of scholars for software projects

The ReX program aims at improving collaboration between research institutions working on computer software projects, especially those involving networking technology. Collaboration is improved by exchanging complementary research knowledge, and facilitated by a grants program covering costs of travel and temporary work abroad.

>> Read more about ReX

TOS;DR — A user rights initiative to rate and label website terms & privacy policies

Terms of service are often too long to read (reading all of these carefully wrought documents could quite literally cost you years of your life), yet it is very important to understand what is in them. After all, your actual legal position online depends on them in a very concrete way. The ratings from TOS;DR can help users get informed about their rights.

>> Read more about TOS;DR