Prototype Fund: secure funding for your Open Source project!

Do you have a great idea for an open source project but no time to build it on your free time? Always wanted to build a Nextcloud app but don’t know how to get funding to get started? The Prototype Fund is calling for applications, giving you the possibility to raise up to 47.500 Euro, and (finally) focus on building your open source project for 6 months.

Engineering Trust!

In the growing complexity of our society, trust is in limited supply. You have to trust what you eat, where you get your news and how your data is kept secure. For their 7th round of funding, the Prototype Fund is looking to support projects designing innovative solutions that provide transparency, security and consumer protection.

The focus « Engineering Trust » covers a whole range of projects (examples here) that can be relevant to Nextcloud and its ecosystem. Think journalism, social media, communication, security, transparency, accountability. Think trust between people, between them and their devices, citizens and institutions, corporations, and more. The need for trust is everywhere, and there are many ways to improve it.

Do you have a project that doesn’t fit the main focus for this round? Don’t hesitate to apply anyway: The Prototype Fund is always looking to fund great open source projects, even if they are not related to the main focus of the round of funding.

Pushing digital social innovation

The Prototype Fund aims to support individuals and small teams in building innovative open source solutions around the topics of civic tech, data literacy, security and software infrastructure. Any projects that fit these criteria are welcome, whether they are related to the main topic of the round or not, as long as they are open source and innovative. You can apply for the current round of funding until September 30th on prototypefund.de.

The Prototype Fund will fund a developer or a small team for half a year. As the project is funded by the German Ministry for Education and Research, in order to be eligible for funding, at least one member of the team needs to live in Germany (citizenship doesn’t matter!).

Want to know more? The Prototype Fund team will present their project and tell you more about how to get funding for your open source project at the Nextcloud Conference, so come ask questions there!

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Some apps

Build on Nextcloud

Being the most popular self-hosted application platform, Nextcloud is great to build a new solution on. The most downloaded apps on our store are installed on over 100.000 servers and have millions of users, providing a big impact for a new app or idea!

Nextcloud is also relatively easy to develop for, with extensive documentation and hundreds of existing apps to look at and get inspiration from. As is extremely scalable and can run on anything from a Raspberry Pi to a large cluster with millions of users, there are no limits to who can benefit from the result of your work.

So do you have an idea on how to detect and block the spread of misinformation on decentralized social networks? Found a way to security prove identities and distribute those proofs? Ideas about how citizens could monitor their government and how they could pool resources and analyze knowledge obtained that way?

Build it on Nextcloud! Of course, the Nextcloud Conference is a great place to start learning how to write Nextcloud apps!

You can find out about the Prototype Fund round 7 here and get started with Nextcloud development here.