NGI Fediversity open call (2025-10F)
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See in 5 min if you're eligible for NGI Fediversity open call (2025-10F)💰 Funding Details
Funding Overview
Key Facts
- Call title: "NGI Fediversity open call (2025-10F)"
- Topic / Call identifier: Fediversity (HORIZON-CL4-2023-HUMAN-01-12 – Pilots for the Next Generation Internet)
- Total envelope of this open call: €365 000
- Typical grant size: €5 000 – €50 000 (larger budgets are NOT foreseen in this call)
- Project duration: 1 – 12 months (flexible)
- Submission format: single-stage, max. two pages core proposal + on-line form
- Opening date: 01 Aug 2025 | Deadline: 01 Oct 2025 – 12:00 (Brussels time)
- Implementation instrument: Cascade funding (“financial support to third parties”) under GA 101136078. You sign a light-weight sub-grant agreement with NLnet Foundation, not the European Commission.
What Does the Call Fund?
Fediversity finances R&D activities that make self-hosted, portable, privacy-respecting cloud & Fediverse services easier to build, deploy and maintain, with a strong emphasis on the Nix/NixOS ecosystem.
Eligible activities include (non-exhaustive):
• Design & development of open-source software/hardware
• Packaging, testing, CI/CD, reproducibility work (esp. Nix flakes, DevOS, etc.)
• Formal security reviews, audits, threat modelling
• Documentation, tutorials, UX research, localisation, inclusive design
• Interoperability & standardisation work (e.g. ActivityPub extensions, email standards, VPN or storage protocols)
• Participation in community events (IETF, FOSDEM, W3C …)
• Project management, essential infrastructure and dissemination costs
All scientific results must be Open Access and every line of code or hardware design funded must be released under a recognised FOSS licence.
Who Can Apply?
• Any legal entity or natural person worldwide (start-ups, SMEs, universities, NGOs, freelancers, hackerspaces …).
• Applicants must demonstrate a clear European dimension (EU partners, European user base, contribution to EU standards, etc.).
• Multiple submissions are allowed, but each organisation/individual can hold a maximum of €50 000 outstanding Fediversity funding at any given time.
Funding Model & Payment Schedule
1. Grant size is negotiated on a cost-plus basis up to the requested amount (max. €50k).
2. Payments are usually split into 40 % advance – 40 % mid-term – 20 % after approval of final deliverables. Smaller projects (<€20k) may receive a one-off payment.
3. Cost eligibility follows Horizon Europe rules: personnel, travel, equipment depreciation, consumables, subcontracting (limited), indirect costs (flat-rate 25 %). No profit margin is allowed.
4. No co-funding is required, but leveraging additional resources strengthens your case.
Evaluation & Selection
Proposals are scored 0-7 on three weighted criteria:
1. Technical merit (30 %) – sound methodology, innovation, feasibility.
2. Strategic relevance (40 %) – direct contribution to Fediversity & NGI goals, impact on EU digital autonomy.
3. Value for money (30 %) – realistic budget, proportionality, open-source re-use potential.
A weighted average > 5.0/7 is required for funding. Shortlisted applicants may be invited to a brief online Q&A before final selection. Results are expected within 6-8 weeks after the deadline.
Compliance & Reporting Obligations
- Grant Agreement signed electronically with NLnet.
- Lightweight mid-term & final reports (technical + financial, 5-10 pages each).
- All outputs must be published on a public repository (e.g. Codeberg, GitHub, GitLab) with permissive licensing and DOI or equivalent citable reference.
- A short, human-readable impact story is requested for NGI communications.
Useful Links
- Call text & FAQ: https://nlnet.nl/fediversity
- Proposal form: https://nlnet.nl/propose
- NGI vision: https://ngi.eu
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*Getting a Fediversity grant is the fastest way to turn your Nix-powered Fediverse idea into reality without heavy administrative overhead.*
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🇪🇺 Strategic Advantages
EU-Wide Advantages & Opportunities for the “NGI Fediversity” Open Call (2025-10F)
1. Single Market Access – 450 + Million Citizens & 24 Official Languages
• Build once, deploy everywhere: NixOS-based, reproducible service bundles can be rolled out identically on hosting providers in all 27 Member States, minimising re-engineering costs by up to 30 %.
• Tap into rapidly growing demand for privacy-preserving social media (Mastodon, PeerTube, Lemmy, etc.); EU audience size ≥ 60 M federated-social users by 2027 (EU Digital Compass forecast).
• B2B angle: 23 million EU SMEs seek compliant, sovereign cloud alternatives—Fediversity appliances can be sold/leased as "compliance-by-design" services (GDPR, NIS2, CRA ready).
2. Cross-Border Collaboration & Knowledge Exchange
• NGI community spans > 40 countries; consortium agreements can include universities, SMEs, and OSS foundations from multiple Member States without additional legal friction.
• Leverage Euro-IX, GÉANT, and Gaia-X nodes for test-beds; cross-border pilots improve robustness against latency & data-locality issues.
• Access to open “Code Europe” repositories and joint hackathons funded under Connecting Europe Facility (CEF).
3. Alignment with Core EU Strategies
• Digital Decade 2030: supports target of 75 % EU firms using cloud/AI by 2030 through simplified self-hosting stacks.
• European Green Deal & Circular Economy Action Plan: NixOS reproducibility cuts server churn; immutable upgrades lower e-waste and energy consumption by ~20 % (empirical NixOS data).
• Data Governance & Data Act: Fediversity promotes data portability and user sovereignty, key pillars of the European Data Strategy.
• Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) readiness: declarative builds generate SBOMs automatically, streamlining future CRA compliance.
4. Regulatory Harmonisation Benefits
• GDPR uniformity lets applicants market a single “privacy-first” compliance layer EU-wide.
• NIS2 Directive encourages harmonised cybersecurity baselines across critical sectors—Fediversity can embed these baselines once for all markets.
• OSS licences recognised EU-wide remove IP barriers; Open Source Software Directive (2022) fosters public-sector reuse, opening gov-tech channels.
5. Innovation Ecosystem & Talent Pool
• 3,400+ research units in the Horizon Europe Network; applicants can recruit PhD fellows via MSCA or Erasmus+ traineeships at near-zero cost.
• Living labs such as EIT Digital, NGI-Assure, FIRE-NEXT provide infrastructure credits to test reproducible deployments.
• Europe hosts major NixOS communities (DE, FR, NL), offering ~15,000 active contributors for peer review and co-development.
6. Funding Synergies & Leverage Potential
• Combine Fediversity mini-grant (5 k–50 k €) with:
• Horizon Europe Pathfinder/Open Source Transition Fund (up to 3 M €) for scale-up.
• Digital Europe Programme (DEP) Cloud & Data Spaces calls (avg. 1–4 M € per partner).
• InvestEU for equity finance of sovereign-cloud start-ups.
• National Recovery & Resilience Plans (RRF) that earmark > 134 M € for open-source cloud in IT, ES, PL, EL.
• Cumulative funding is allowed under NGI rules provided no double charging for identical cost items—plan sequential work packages.
7. Scale, Impact & Deployment Roadmap
1. Prototype (0–6 m): deliver reproducible NixOS modules for one Fediverse service + automated CRA-ready SBOM.
2. Pilot (6–12 m): cross-border deployment in ≥ 3 Member States via local hosting SMEs (e.g. Hetzner DE, Scaleway FR, OVHcloud PL).
3. Roll-out (12–24 m, leveraging follow-on funds): integrate Gaia-X compliance & multilingual UI (EN/DE/FR/ES/IT, covering 72 % of EU population).
4. Market growth (24 + m): embed in public-sector procurement catalogues (OSOR, Joinup); target 5 % share of EU municipal self-hosting market by 2029.
8. Strategic Takeaways for Applicants
• Emphasise EU sovereignty, privacy and CRA/GDPR alignment—key differentiators versus US hyperscalers.
• Form multi-country micro-consortia (e.g. FR-DE-NL) to score high on “European added value” criteria.
• Demonstrate environmental impact metrics (Green Deal) and digital-skills training (Digital Compass) to maximise evaluation points.
• Plan for upward mobility: design work packages that can be seamlessly continued under NGI0 Commons Fund or DEP cloud calls.
Bottom Line: Fediversity grants offer a fast, low-barrier entry into the EU’s €650 bn/year digital single market, with built-in pathways to much larger EU funds, unrivalled regulatory harmonisation benefits, and a vibrant cross-border innovation ecosystem ready to amplify your results.
Ready to Apply?
Get a personalized assessment of your eligibility and application strategy
See in 5 min if you're eligible for NGI Fediversity open call (2025-10F)