NLnet Bewerbung 2025

Grant deadline: October 1st 2025 12:00 CEST (noon). Referenzen:

• NGI Zero Commons Fund Eligibility information

Please select a call

In the list of current calls below, please indicate the call topic you are responding to. Note that some larger funds (like the NGI0 Commons Fund) and smaller funds with targeted calls (like NGI Fediversity, TALER and Mobifree — all part of the Next Generation Internet initiative) will have some special scope or conditions. You'd better have a look at the respective guides for applicants before you submit a proposal. If in doubt, submit to our open call and mention in the application that you are okay with us allocating your proposal to the most suitable fund.

Thematic call:

• NGI Zero Commons Fund
• NGI TALER
• NGI Mobifree
• NGI Fediversity
• Research & Higher Education Technology Fund (May not be active right now?)
• Open Call
• Other

Contact Information

Your Name	...
Email adress	...
Phone number	...
Organisation	BorgNetzWerk e.V.
Country	Germany

General project information

Proposal name	...
Website / wiki	...

Please be short and to the point in your answers; focus primarily on the what and how, not so much on the why. Add longer descriptions as attachments (see below). If English isn't your first language, don't worry — our reviewers don't care about spelling errors, only about great ideas. We apologise for the inconvenience of having to submit in English. On the up side, you can be as technical as you need to be (but you don't have to). Do stay concrete. Use plain text in your reply only, if you need any HTML to make your point please include this as attachment.

Abstract (1167/1200)

Can you explain the whole project and its expected outcome(s).

We want to increase findability of valuable knowledge hidden in Videos and Podcasts.

We do this by identifying venues that communicate scientifically sound, yet still commonly understandable. These include almost every aspect of science communication (SciCom, or german "WissKomm" - we'll come back to that later), but also lectures and talks at the CCC, a public health podcast and every form of fact-checking. Our focus lies on audiovisual content, which is easily and frequently consumed, yet hard for machines to handle. We want to go beyond scarse metadata and poorly translated transcripts: We are thinking of a Wikisource for current audiovisual media, a catalog for the videos and podcasts you're actually looking for, a navigation aid in the information flood:

We are building the WissKomm Wiki.

An example: EDRi. An insanely important project, 184 videos on the YouTube channel, easily half of them fitting our definition of valuable knowledge in need of reaching people. Yet, after 14 years, 50.000 views. We need an infrastructure to elevate their knowledge from the noise, and help people finding it when they need it.

Contributions to similar projects (2391/2500)

Have you been involved with projects or organisations relevant to this project before? And if so, can you tell us a bit about your contributions?
(Optional) This can help us determine if you are the right person to undertake this effort.

What you wrote on nlnet.nl/nren hit close to home:

"because they were given enough freedom to deviate from their official tasks and do what needed to be done. The beautiful result is the internet: the largest communication infrastructure the world has ever built."
"potential contributions and innovations 'for the greater good' now find themselves shelved - in some cases for ever."

I started this idea with a computer science and mechanical engineering background, as a PhD student in an system engineering chair. Yet I found that there is often no place for charity, for "what needed to be done". My proposal of applying our knowledge management skills on scientific communication was shelved for "let's reconsider in two years". Instead, I left the chair and sought other professors with an open science mindeset, and found the place: TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology and University Library.

Since 2023, I work in Hannover under the TIB Director and Open Knowledge Foundation Germany Co-Founder Prof. Sören Auer. While I maintain meeting the goals every PhD Student should, he gave me "enough freedom to deviate from my official tasks" and allowed me to:

• work on the WissKomm Wiki from day one,
• visit many key conferences, submit and hold talks and connect with every individual in his & my reach,
• write several proposals, incrementally learning what needs to be done, with the most recent one hopefully dedicating academic funding for the next 2 years,

all while working directly on and with great existing projects:

• Open Research Knowledge Graph
• TIB AV-Portal
• MediaWiki, particularly Wikibase

By the end of the year, I will have:

• published two papers towards science communication knowledge infrastructure [[[1]],2],
• held at least three tech talks [3,4, 5] and four science slams [6, 7, (8,9 not online)]
• had the honor of being the general chair of the MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference Fall 2025

and just now the 39C3 Chaos Communication Congress Submission. Following our transparency values, all our proposals are always open first, most noteworthy the annual startsocial proposal (->2025), which tells everyone exactly who we are, what we do and how we want to reach it, alongside expert feedback.

This very proposal, NLnet 2025, is also available there, where some of the links above propably are a bit more usefull.

Requested support

Requested Amount

45.000

Explanation (2159/2500)

Explain what the requested budget will be used for?
Does the project have other funding sources, both past and present?
A breakdown in the main tasks with associated effort is appreciated. Make rates explicit.
(If you want, you can in addition attach a full budget at the bottom of the form)

Explain costs for hardware, human labor (including rates used), travel cost to technical meetings, etc.

We are a non-profit charity and want to remain just that, driven by and made for volunteers. Yet, our feedback, startsocial and beyond, is unanimous: We need to think bigger and invest money. One reviewer calulated a recommendation of 50.000 € annual budget, and while we would certainly appreciate the realization of this vision, we cautiosly dream a bit smaller:

• One year, 45.000 €, of which
• 20.000 € are dedicated to lay a legal framework, of which we already know we'll need between 5.000 € and 18.000 € at least to ensure we build a sound system that can sustainably support european citicens,
• 20.000 € dedicated to marketing, a concept we had to grow into, since we are scientists, developers and engineers first and foremost, and are only now enetering the attention economy arena. We strive to maintain our collaborative mindset by first jumpstarting our marketing ressources to then immediately give back to the community by giving this visisibility to the creators.
• And 5.000 € are dedicated to a buffer, most likely consumed by physical production cost of previously digital goods, such as workshop posters, flyers, QR-code-bookmarks, etc.

We seek to find a self-sustaining equilibrium, where - once enough people know, appreciate, use and share our fundamentally free services - donations can cover our running costs.

Once we have the ball rolling, our maintenance mode does not much funding. The primary reason why we and nobody else has done "what needs to be done" is the legally unclear waters, the huge upfront organizational overhead and the low economic long-term incentive. The reasons why we know that we can succeed right there are manyfold:

• We have already founded a non-profit organization to sustainably anchor the maintanance and thriving of the to-be-ecosystem,
• have the support of dream-partners such as Wikimedia Deutschland and TIB,
• can build on yearly extended knowledge from startsocial feedback,
• and have the scientific fundament to support and demonstrate need and feasibility.

With some legal and marketing support, we are good to go. We kindly ask for just that for now, nothing more.

Compared to existing efforts (3760/4000)

Compare your own project with existing or historical efforts.

E.g. what is new, more thorough or otherwise different. (max 4000 characters, be concise)

We'll be concise, we've talked on each of them extensively in many aformentioned ressources:

• Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG) and Wikidata are the two most noteworthy comparisons. Both are knowledge bases, specifically knowledge graphs. One is too narrow (Scientific Papers), the other too broad (literally everything noteworthy). If not for the computational and volunteering ressource limits of Wikidata, we'd likely not need another knowledge graph. Since they exist, we do.
• OpenJur and Wikisource are similarly large repositories of uniformly accessible textual data. Yet, both are legally simple: public domain data. We seek to annotate data not 70 years after the authors death, but just days after they aired it. If not for the legal limits, we'd likely be able to stitch together Wikidata and Wikisource to build everything the WissKomm Wiki needs. As it is, we can't.

Those two are the major ones: Store linked data as well as some large text data, such as transcripts and descriptions.

For completeness, a short summary of three important organizations in the field:

• Wikimedia Foundation Germany our role model and long-standing exchange partner, which manages the (German) Wikipedia systems and has a systemic impact, e.g. in Bündnis F5 with Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, Algorithm Watch, Society for Civil Rights, and Reporters Without Borders.
• The Chaos Computer Club promotes a bottom-up culture of digital possibilities that is conscious of the common good, in which science communication is a marginal topic.
• The TIB supports projects such as OERSI, Twillo, AV-Portal and ORKG, as well as its director, the doctoral position of our founder.

And some smaller ones:

• Science Media Center curates individual artifacts in a top-down, labor-intensive manner and creates overviews, primarily for journalism.
• Wissenschaft im Dialog covers structural science communication and is primarily aimed at systemic decision-makers.
• National Institute for Science Communication (NaWik) is one of the best organizational points of contact for science communication. They operate a WissKon NetzWerk including an annual conference.
• reflecta.network offers an ecosystem for future shapers, which also includes science communication.
• InMind coordinates and trains psychologists in science communication.
• Wissen{chaft}spodcasts collects science podcasts.
• NFDI networks research data.
• GroundNews curates news.
• abgeordnetenwatch curates politicians.

A robust knowledge infrastructure for science communication is missing; there is a lack of cross-project collaboration. Our goal is to network the individual contributions of the projects based on the needs of a comprehensive, democratic, fact-based dialogue:

• factual and operational knowledge from scientific content
• public-interest-oriented actors who contribute to scientific communication
• free tools for empowering society to create a shared reality

We help with networking and utilizing their already great contributions into a cohesive knowledge infrastructure for audiovisual media.

Technical challenges (0/5000 )

What are significant technical challenges you expect to solve during the project, if any?

(optional but recommended)

Most we've solved already:

• SciCom Wiki: Fact-Checking and FAIR Knowledge Distribution for Scientific Videos and Podcasts (https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2505.07912)
  • with the (german) Master Thesis some important bits: A digital knowledge infrastructure to provide information on scientific videos and podcasts (https://doi.org/10.15488/18996)
  • and the talk making sure we gaged the ecosystem correctly, SciCom Wiki - FAIR knowledge infrastructure for educational content (https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Users_and_Developers_Conference_Fall_2024/SciCom_Wiki_-_FAIR_knowledge_infrastructure_for_educational_content)

The key issue is that the next big issue is specifically not technical - precicely why it is so hard to overcome. We are engineers and developers, we can overcome technological struggles, yet legal are a different ballpark, same as marketing.

What we now need is professional legal and marketing support, or money to ensure we can pay for it. Then - no significant technical challenges ahead.

Ecosystem (0/5000 )

Describe the ecosystem of the project, and how you will engage with relevant actors and promote the outcomes?

E.g. which actors will you involve? Who should run or deploy your solution to make it a success? (max 2500 characters, be concise)

Attatchments

Attachments: add any additional information about the project that may help us to gain more insight into the proposed effort, for instance a more detailed task description, a justification of costs or relevant endorsements. Attachments should only contain background information, please make sure that the proposal without attachments is self-contained and concise. Don't waste too much time on this. Really.

Accepted formats for attachments are:
HTML, PDF, OpenDocument Format and plain text files.
(The total size of attachments must not exceed 50 MB)

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