NGI national and EU initiatives

#ICT2018 Networking Session: Let's create the next generation internet - it's ours to shape!

NGI in Austria: focusing funding on societal and legal developments in sync with technology developments
Oliver Hoffman, Austrian Ministry for Infrastructure, presented the recent national calls in relation to NGI topics. It is recognised that the projects not only address technology developments, but must also focus on societal and legal developments. It is well known that the latter lags behind technology’ developments, so the motivation in our calls is to better synchronise those developments from the very start. Thus, the funding on national level in Austria focuses on the inter-disciplinary nature of NGI challenges. If you have a technology innovation, the legal and social motivation might not be there and need ramping up and included from the start. Austria had a first call on this in 2017, entitled ICT of the Future with a funding of €500, 000 - these are the projects presented during the ICT2018 Networking Session. In 2018, funding has increased to €700,000.

NGI in EU: Driving NGI with new research and innovation actions
Andres Sanchez Sandaza, presented LEDGER, one of the RIAs funded in the last NGI call addressing Decentralised Data Governance. Subtitle of LEDGER is “The Venture Builder for Human centric solutions”. More info will soon be available at http://www.ledgerproject.eu. Some information is already available at http://ngi.eu/opencalls/. The concept is to have 32 projects covering topics like privacy by Design, Open software, as well as decentralised technologies such as blockchain, peer to peer, and distributed ledger technologies. The winners of the cascading funding (open calls) will also receive mentoring and support from senior experts along the road to market and MVP. It is expected that the best 16 projects will get to the final phase and receive more funding, up to a maximum of €200,000.