Report
Teaser, summary, work performed and final results
Periodic Reporting for period 1 - NGI MOVE (Ecosystem building blocks for the Next Generation Internet movement)
Teaser
Making space for a non-technocratic vision for Europe The ambitious goal of the Next Generation Internet initiative launched by the European Commission in 2016 is to support the development of a human-centric internet. In the words of Roberto Viola, DG Connect General...
Summary
Making space for a non-technocratic vision for Europe
The ambitious goal of the Next Generation Internet initiative launched by the European Commission in 2016 is to support the development of a human-centric internet. In the words of Roberto Viola, DG Connect General Director, the human internet “should be designed for humans, so that it can meet its full potential for society and economy and reflect the social and ethical values that we enjoy in our societies. The values promoted are European ones, such as openness, inclusivity and equality.
The definition is broad, but it serves the objective well: Intuitively, we all know what is at stake. The “commercial internet†visions dominate the development, and the “human internet†vision has become hampered by commercial successes and an excess of naivety among consumers and policymakers. Europe is emerging as a global regulatory superpower, and this is likely to be its main role in the geopolitical theatre in the coming years. But the visions for a “human internet†must not only be defensive; these visions must create spaces for creativity and imagination and open new possibilities for businesses and citizens to thrive without it being at each other’s expense. Otherwise, the “human†and “for the common good†extensions – increasingly present in conferences, products and policies slogans – risk becoming the public image of just another form of radical surveillance and disempowerment in disguise as frictionless services.
In order to gather the most impactful group of constituencies in a community, build a shared vision, inspire policymaking and streamline possible alternatives, the NGI Move project toured Europe (and the world) with 80 salons and co-creation workshops, reaching over 5,000 people. The events aimed at rethinking the internet’s assumed functioning (in terms of technology, governance, sustainability, values, citizens’ agency) and debating existing and desirable alternatives. The discussions were held with policymakers, engineers, artists, researchers, start-uppers, investors, cryptographers and students ranging from middle school to PhD, just to name a few. The project also launched the NGI Awards, rewarding excellence in the domains of research, start-ups and culture: The eight winners range from communities advocating for a novel personal data paradigm, to open source encrypted software, to researchers exploring technologies.
Work performed
Six booths
• Participation to the Proposers’ Day Booth
• Organisation of the Internet Governance Forum Booth
• Graz Security Week
• Web Summit Lisbon
• Organisation of the NGI booth at 4YFN18
• Organisation of the NGI booth at 4YFN19
Seven Webinars
• Participation to the overall NGI webinar on ICT-24 and related calls
• Organisation of three specialised webinars for each subtopic of ICT-24-2018
• Organisation of three specialized webinars for each of the ICT-24-2019
Nine Meetups
• Organisation and facilitation of one meetup in Barcelona linked to the Smart City EXPO
• Organisation and facilitation of two meetups in Amsterdam on at Thingscon and the other at the Things Network
• Organization and facilitation of one meetup in Vienna at Maker Comm
• Organisation and facilitation of one meetup at Stockwerk in Vienna
• Organisation and facilitation of one meetup at “Digitale Zukunft sozial gerecht gestallten†in Vienna
• Organisation and facilitation of one meetup at Maker Fair in Lyon Tuba
• Organisation and facilitation of one meetup at Digital Dialog Cyber Security in Graz
• Organisation and facilitation of one meetup in Ghent
12 salons
• Organisation and facilitation of a Salon in Budapest at the Proposers’ Day
• Organisation and facilitation of three Salons in Barcelona, one at the Smart City Plaza and another at 4YFN Smart City EXPO (both 2017) and one at 4YFN (2018)
• Organisation and facilitation of a Salon in Brussels focused on Decentralised Data Governance
• Organisation and facilitation of a Salon in Warsaw on the wider topic of NGI
• Organisation and facilitation of a Salon in Berlin at Transmediale contributing to the definition of the “human†aspects of the Next Generation Internet
• Organisation and facilitation of a Salon in Ljubljana on FUTURE NGI ECOSYSTEMS AND ROLE OF SME IN NGI
• Organisation and facilitation of a Salon in Aarhus at IWDK
• Organisation and facilitation of a Salon in Podgorica
• Organisation and facilitation of a Salon in Paris at Futur.e.s./CAP digital
• Organisation and facilitation of a Salon in Berlin at ICSC Global Perspectives
Sixteen panels were organized and NGI members form the NGI move or sister projects participated:
• Organisation and moderation of two panels in Barcelona at 4YFN18 and 4YFN19
• Organisation and moderation of two panels in Aarhus at IWDK and Back to Business
• Organisation and moderation of three panels in Brussels at European Internet of Things Conference, Brussels Tech Summit and Towards a Good AI Society
• Organisation and moderation of additional panels at
o Cyber-Security im Maschinen- und Anlagenbau (Graz),
o Living Bits and Things (Bled),
o Futurefest (London),
o IoT Latin America (Sao Paulo),
o NGI Forum (Porto),
o IoT World Expo (Wuxi),
o Rhodes Forum (Rhodes)
o Design and Art/Technology (Taipei/Hangzhou),
o Future City Development of Lingang Conference (Shanghai)
Final results
Our proposal: new protocols reflecting a new culture
In NGI Move, we propose to think in terms of infrastructure, services and entitlements. Infrastructure needs to be balanced between capabilities in the Cloud (data lakes and AI) and edge (5G), between intricate and complex semi-autonomous to autonomous self-healing systems on one side and local reparability to ensure everyday resilience on the other. Infrastructure supports services. A service is any operation that supports either machines or people in their wellbeing and their ability to build a meaningful and cooperative existence. This thus entails the entire trajectory from Body Area Networks to Local Area Networks to Wide Area Networks: BAN (body, wearables), LAN (home, smart services to the home), WAN (mobility in general from bike to connected car and plane) and VWAN (the very wide area network; the smart city). Blockchain as well as connectivity itself has become a commodity and is thus a service in this view. Services support everyday activities and are supported by entitlements. Entitlements are new entities, as synchronous and fixed identities cannot support services in a hybrid infrastructure. A balance between anonymity (in federated sets of identities that are tied to services such as shopping, dating, recovering from illness ...) and accountability (in stable sets of relationships of behaviour and activity) for processes, machines, products and people is vital to create popular support for a new type of governance from all generations.
In NGI Move we propose a three-step process to build a political inclusive democratic internet ecosystem.
Website & more info
More info: https://www.ngi.eu.