Open Call for NGI Mobifree Consortium

Their goal is to help mobile technology evolve to a more healthy state, provide people with concrete new tools and more reliable infrastructure, in order to provide better security and allow users more agency and choice. But this is a vast domain, with many more challenges than what any preconceived effort could tackle by itself.

Mobifree is a pilot programme designed to push beyond the status quo of mobile software, and create a virtuous cycle of innovation through free and open source software, libre hardware and open standards. It has brought together a number of the “movers and shakers” of the open mobile ecosystem, in order to deliver a comprehensive development effort and advance a number of important free and open source technologies.

Objective

• The key objective is to deliver potential break-through contributions to the open internet. All scientific outcomes must be published as open access, and any software and hardware must be published under a recognised open source license in its entirety.

Funding Information

• The NGI Mobifree Consortium will competitively award €670,000 worth of grants (15% of its total budget) to independent researchers.
• The maximum amount to be granted per third party over the lifetime of NGI Mobifree is 60k euro. A third party can be an organisation or an individual.

Eligible Projects

• Project proposals are written in English and:
  • should be in line with the NGI vision and the sub-granting call applied for
  • should have research and development as their primary objective
  • should satisfy any other hard eligibility criteria specific to the sub-granting call, such as having a clear European Dimension.

Eligible Activities

• 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 Mobifree and the objectives set out in the call:
  • scientific research
  • design and development of free and 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, including educational materials
  • 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.

Eligibility Criteria

• Given equal proposals, inhabitants of the EU and countries associated to Horizon Europe are given priority, however if the project is of exceptional quality and the proposer holds unique technical expertise proposals from outside of those geographic areas can be eligible as well.

For more information, visit European Commission.