This is the third part of APC’s Building a Free Internet of the Future series, in which we publish a monthly interview with the beneficiaries of the NGI Zero (NGI0) grant. Funded by the European Commission, NGI0 supports free software, open data, open hardware and open standards projects. It provides both financial and practical support in a myriad of ways, including mentoring, testing, security tests, accessibility, dissemination and more.
This month we speak to Esther Payne, community manager and privacy advocate at Librecast. The organisation develops free and open-source (FOSS) software to enable multicast transmitting data to groups simultaneously without depending on a centralised structure. The project began in 2016, and in 2019 they successfully applied for the first NGI0 programme called Search and Discovery. Librecast Live, a multicast live-streaming, conferencing and remote collaborative work environment, was also eventually funded by the NGI Assure Fund.
As the team leaders say, Librecast is a “human rights project masquerading as a technology project”, and we were eager to explore how and why this might be the case. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
How did you hear about NGI0?
We’ve always been on the lookout for research and development (R&D) funding, but very often those funds were tied to being available for institutions and businesses rather than individuals or small FOSS projects just getting started. So the ease of the NLNet process for small starter allocations really made a difference to us. It helped us to get started and expand the concept from our initial multicast IoT updater proof of concept.
We were also fortunate to get a small grant allocation for testing our IoT software updates over IPv6 multicast (IoTup) code with Fed4fire. What we’ve always loved about NGI Zero is that the selection committee does take the time to understand each application, and will contact the applicants to see how prepared they are to undertake a project. The NGI Zero approach with its various partners really gives us support and helps with project sustainability. NLNet also takes care to interact with the FOSS community so that we know what services and potential funding and support programmes are available.
In a 2023 essay titled “Five Years of NGI Zero”, you affirm your collaborations with other NGI0 members, encourage others to apply to NGI0 and also invite them to ask you for assistance. What makes you so committed?
I’m committed to my project Librecast, and beyond that to NGI because of where it starts from – human rights. Our current landscape online is dominated by walled gardens, like Facebook, Instagram, Microsoft and Google. All of these firms are American. They provide a service to people but human rights, specifically, the right to privacy, are left at the door.
Our society and our government have enabled the rights of corporations over the rights of humans to live in safety, privacy and dignity. We also see access to the internet being curtailed by some regimes to stop communication with the rest of the world with net blockages. There’s a copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights hanging on my office wall. Every time I look at it, it helps me to reaffirm my commitment to helping others safeguard their human rights.
The code we create, and the tools we use, can help or harm humanity. We write our political values into our code and the communities we create around our projects. So the code we write must start from the concept of human rights, specifically the right to privacy and freedom of association. All of the projects that NGI Zero has funded do encode that concept of human rights in some way. I want to help other people join NGI Zero as a funded project because this means they are committed to those values as well. With more of us, there are more ways we can work together to build the Next Generation Internet (NGI).
The NGI0 grant budget is dedicated to features and R&D work. Which activities has NGI0 enabled you to execute?
I’m fortunate that my co-founder Brett Sheffield recognises my work for Librecast and outside Librecast. Partly that’s because we’ve worked together for over 15 years. The funding has enabled both of us to work on Librecast full time, Brett codes and I help him stay focused on the code. I write grant proposals for additional work, run the community-facing tasks, liaise with other projects and help keep the focus on our goals. Very often individual developers are working alone and a bit overwhelmed, looking for additional funding or ways for their software to be distributed. This is the social aspect, the community aspect. I’m happy to provide that support, but I’m very aware that work is often underappreciated in other project communities.
NGI Zero gives projects additional resources to build on community and security, but the fund also offers developers the discretion to distribute a portion of the grant to the support around them. When you are funded, it does take away the worry [of money]. This in turn means you can help other projects if they have a shortfall in skills, or even if they just need some advice with funds or resources they can apply for. I feel that I need to give back in anyway that I can. There’s a saying, “Arising tide lifts all boats”; I want to ensure that more of us get on the boat, or better yet, build more boats. I want to help projects build healthy communities together. NGI Zero lets me do this.
Do you collaborate with other projects extended grants by NGI0?
Librecast is still a fairly small, young project. For the first few years of NGI Zero, it’s mostly been social coordination with fellow NGI0 grantees. We have one project in particular that we are close to – Interpeer – which offers technologies for open and distributed software architectures. They aim to provide a secure and efficient human-centric networking stack that protects human rights by design. Both of our projects are focusing on human rights and how that applies to the whole stack. Librecast and Interpeer have very similar, explicit goals for designing software and networks, starting from human rights. Both projects are aiming to design networks with the freedom of speech and association explicitly built in from the beginning. This is where the political co-ordination begins. Designing software that anyone can run, study, modify and distribute is a political action. Choosing to reject proprietary software development is an explicit political and social act. You’re choosing to give your work to the community.
We are working to integrate Librecast into Interpeer. We’ve always aimed to provide tools (like LCRQ and liblibrecast) as software libraries so that other developers can create multicast applications. We build small tools so that others can easily see our code and adapt it.
We recently said in our NGI interview, “We don’t do this alone. We have no competitors. Everyone who is working to improve and protect human rights is our ally. There are many paths to the top of this mountain.” We also recently signed the NGI open letter which Petites Singularities created in response to NGI being dropped from Cluster 4 funding. It’s wonderful to see so many projects and organisations step up and be visible. NGI funding has made a huge difference to so many projects. I hope we can collaborate with other projects in the future the way we are with Interpeer.
There is no guarantee that the NGI0 cascade funding mechanism will be renewed. As you mentioned, you signed an open letter [also signed by APC] asking for continued, financial support for Free Software. What is your view of this case?
We have to look at the current context of the wider tech world. AI investment is hot right now. NGI Zero was told there was no space in the budget as most of it was invested in AI. If you look at the open letter, you will see that AI projects signed it. So there’s something more complex going on here than AI hogging all the attention and funding.
Horizon EU is focused on industrial R&D. It wants to help create large unicorn organisations in the mould of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. I have a few issues with this goal. Most innovation tends to happen in very small teams or among individuals. When you create large organisations, they will often end up headquartered in large cities. Conversely, the EU wants to stop the depopulation of certain empty parts of Europe that have been traditionally agricultural. But the EU isn’t a monolithic organisation: it has to serve citizens and residents who have different goals. FOSS has the potential to decentralise this so that people can work from home and collaborate remotely, which could mean that more of us could live in these depopulated spaces. It would also be better for the environment.
Taking it back to NGI Zero, cancelling the cascade funding will make life harder for projects. The impact of this cut won’t be felt in 2025. It will be felt from 2026 onwards as the current NGI programme, NGI Zero Core, and then other NGI programmes, close in 2027. The potential for FOSS funding will be reduced in 2025 with the recent news that the RIPE Community Projects Fund is taking a break for a year. While we have the Sovereign Tech fund, it will not cover new ideas or new projects. There will be less money to go around and projects that need additional money to fund continued development won’t have that.
The internet and web that we have today is a result of years of work and huge amounts of investment. Development on projects in the Fediverse in comparison has been on a shoestring budget. We give a huge amount of value. We’re spread across Europe and the world. The cancellation of cascade funding would be a disaster for the FOSS community. Which is ridiculous when you consider how much of our systems run on FOSS. Without that funding, you risk more XZ security attacks and potentially another CrowdStrike.
The EU needs to consider longer term investment, as in decades not three-year programmes. Otherwise, if any projects do become unicorns they will just decamp to California where their VCs (venture capitals) tell them to go. In order to build that next-generation internet, you need to have people from different backgrounds, orientations and lived experience to build it. The NGI Funds, particularly NGI Zero, are unique because of the openness of the calls.
Xavier Coadic is a consultant for the NGI0 consortium, and a free/libre open source software activist with 15 years of experience in free open source cultures and communities (software, data hardware, wetware, policy makers and political groups, research and development).