We can’t be happier at NGI Sargasso to say goodbye to 2023 with 79 tech innovators willing to be selected in our funding program to unleash the Internet of the future with a human-centric approach.
Last Monday, the 18th of December 2023, at 17:00h we closed our second open call that had been running for two months -we launched it on the 18th of October as we announced you in our previous newsletter. We were calling for startups, SMEs, Universities and research centres, and NGOs and foundations to join us in our transatlantic journey of creating an Internet of trust. We received 168 open applications, 79 of those in submitted status, coming from 21 Europe and its Associated Countries, besides the US and Canada, to tackle ten Next Generation Internet challenges.
External evaluators will start now the process of carefully reviewing each proposal submitted, and we will announce the final winners in January 2024. Beneficiaries will receive up to €100,000 equity-free funding per project and will start an up to 9-month Capacity Building program including mentoring and coaching services from top mentors.
Since we have to distribute a total of €4.8M in funding, we will launch three more open calls, the third and next one in Spring 2024, with the novelty of accepting applications from the UK, besides Europe and its Associated Countries, the US and Canada, as in our first two calls.
The NGI Sargasso Inspirational Talks
In fact, our innovators from the first open call are already completing their Capacity Building program. In October, they had the pleasure to enjoy an Inspirational Talk by Glenn Ricart, Founder and CTO at US Ignite (one of our partners) and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the University of Utah, about how many Internets we should have, including Dr. Ricart’s definition of Internet:
“An Internet is a collaboration with the real world interconnecting great minds, incredible datasets (most real-time), and models that both mimic and have rich interactions with reality” – Glenn Ricart.
This week, they also had the opportunity to listen to Mirko Boehm, Community Developer at The Linux Foundation Europe to discover how they work fostering transatlantic cooperative projects. After the talks, our innovators engaged on interesting Q&As and discussions with the guest experts.
The NGI Forum 2023
With our second open call running seeking Internet innovators and our first open call beneficiaries accomplishing their program, at the NGI Sargasso consortium we have been quite busy.
However, we couldn’t miss the NGI Forum 2023 celebrated in Brussels on the 15th and 16th of November to meet Europe’s top Internet innovators at work to build an Internet of Trust, empowering end-users with more choice and control over their data and digital identity.
We got inspired by hearing many amazing success stories from the NGI – The Next Generation Internet initiative. One of them was the case of our innovator Alex Grech, Executive Director at the University of Malta and NGI Sargasso open call one beneficiary with the project EBSI-CAN: ‘EBSI and verifiable credentialing in Canada’.
Grech participated as a moderator at “PLENARY 2: Shaping Digital Identity and Credentials in the Web 4.0 Era: Empowering and Safeguarding Individuals in the Online World”, a panel that explored whether – and how – three European Commission’s flagship initiatives, the European Digital Identity (EUDI) Regulation, reinforced by the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI), and the Next Generation Internet (NGI), could steer technological developments towards social and environmental good.
That is all for our third wave of NGI Sargasso news, to which we invite you to subscribe here.
Stay tuned for updates, success stories, and the latest developments within the NGI Sargasso project. Together, let’s shape the future of the Next Generation Internet!
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This newsletter was originally published on NGI Sargasso LinkedIn.