We are very excited to announce the four projects receiving funding from the Next Generation Internet Policy-in-Practice Fund.
Policymakers and public institutions have more levers at their disposal to spur
innovation in the internet space than often thought, and can play a powerful role in
shaping new markets for ethical tools. We particularly believe that local
experimentation and ecosystem building are vital if we want to make alternative models
for the internet actually tangible and gain traction. But finding the funding and
space to undertake this type of trial is not always easy – especially if
outcomes are uncertain. Through the NGI Policy-in-Practice fund, it has been our aim
not only to provide the means to organisations to undertake a number of these trials
but also make the case for local trials more generally.
Over the past summer and autumn, we went through a highly competitive applications process, ultimately selecting four ambitious initiatives that embody this vision behind the NGI Policy-in-Practice fund. Each of the projects will receive funding of up to €25,000 to test out their idea on a local level and generate important insights that could help us build a more trustworthy, inclusive and democratic future internet.
In conjunction with this announcement, we have released an interview with each of our grantees, explaining their projects and the important issues they are seeking to address in more detail. You can also find a short summary of each project below.
Interoperability to challenge Big Tech power
This project is run by a partnership of three organisations:
Commons Network and
Open Future, based in Amsterdam, Berlin and Warsaw.
This project explores whether the
principle of interoperability, the idea that services should be able to work together,
and data portability, which would allow users to carry their data with them to new
services, can help decentralise power in the digital economy. Currently, we are, as
users, often locked into a small number of large platforms. Smaller alternative
solutions, particularly those that want to maximise public good rather than optimise
for profit, find it hard to compete in this winner-takes-all economy. Can we use
interoperability strategically and seize the clout of trusted institutions such as
public broadcasters and civil society, to create an ecosystem of fully interoperable
and responsible innovation in Europe and beyond?
Through a series of co-creation workshops, the project will explore how this idea could work in practice, and the role trusted public institutions can play in bringing it to fruition.
Bridging the Digital Divide through Circular Public Procurement
This project will be run by eReuse, based in Barcelona, with support from the City of Barcelona, the Technical University of Barcelona (UPC) and the global Association for Progressive Communications.
During the pandemic, where homeschooling and remote working have become the norm overnight, bridging the digital divide has become more important than ever. This project is investigating how we can make it easier for public bodies and also the private sector to donate old digital devices, such as laptops and smartphones, to low-income families currently unable to access the internet.
By extending the lifetime of a device in this way, we are also reducing the environmental footprint of our internet use. Laptops and phones now often end up being recycled, or, worse, binned, long before their actual “useful lifespan” is over, putting further strain on the system. Donating devices could be a simple but effective mechanism for ensuring the circular economy of devices is lengthened.
The project sets out to do two things: first, it wants to try out this mechanism on a local level and measure its impact through tracking the refurbished devices over time. Second, it wants to make it easier to replicate this model in other places, by creating legal templates that can be inserted in public and private procurement procedures, making it easier for device purchasers to participate in this kind of scheme. The partnership also seeks to solidify the network of refurbishers and recyclers across Europe. The lessons learned from this project can serve as an incredibly useful example for other cities, regions and countries to follow.
Bringing Human Values to Design Practice
This project will be run by the BBC with support from Designswarm, LSE and the University of Sussex.
Many of the digital services we use today, from our favourite news outlet to social media networks, rely on maximising “engagement” as a profit model. A successful service or piece of content is one that generates many clicks, drives further traffic, or generates new paying users. But what if we optimised for human well-being and values instead?
This project, led by the BBC, seeks to try out a more human-centric focused approach to measuring audience engagement by putting human values at its core. It will do so by putting into practice longer-standing research work on mapping the kinds of values and needs their users care about the most, and developing new design frameworks that would make it easier to actually track these kinds of alternative metrics in a transparent way.
The project will run a number of design workshops and share its findings through a dedicated website and other outlets to involve the wider community. The learnings and design methodology that will emerge from this work will not just be trialled within the contexts of the project partners, but will also be easily replicable by others interested in taking a more value-led approach.
Responsible data sharing for emergencies: citizens in control
This project will be run by the Dutch National Police, in partnership with the Dutch Emergency Services Control, the Amsterdam Safety Region and the City of Amsterdam.
In a data economy that is growing ever more complex, giving meaningful consent about what happens to our personal data remains one of the biggest unsolved puzzles. But new online identity models have shown to be a potentially very promising solution, empowering users to share only that information that they want to share with third parties, and sharing that data on their own terms. One way that would allow such a new approach to identity and data sharing to scale would be to bring in government and other trusted institutions to build their own services using these principles. That is exactly what this project seeks to do.
The project has already laid out all the building blocks of their Data Trust Infrastructure but wants to take it one step further by actually putting this new framework into practice. The project brings together a consortium of Dutch institutional partners to experiment with one first use case, namely the sharing of vital personal data with emergency services in the case of, for example, a fire. The project will not just generate learnings about this specific trial, but will also contribute to the further finetuning of the design of the wider Data Trust Infrastructure, scope further use cases (of which there are many!), and bring on board more interested parties.