[NLnet Press] "From VoIP/chat convergence to access to public information"

[NLnet foundation press list]

Six open technology projects funded by NLnet foundation
"From VoIP/chat convergence to access to public information"


                            Amsterdam, Thursday September 20th 2007

A project to unite VoIP and chat through internet standards, an
educational program to train open source ambassadors, a zero-cost
reliable certification authority and creative software foundry dyne.org
are among the first six activities funded through NLnet foundation's new
funding scheme launched in June this year. The projects were selected
from twenty-three proposals submitted by individuals, companies and
communities from all over the world.

NLnet foundation is an independent philantrophic organisation
supporting strategic open standards and open source initiatives. "We
think we have identified a number of very interesting projects that in
their diversity will all contribute in bringing us further towards our
goal of an open information society", states strategy director Michiel
Leenaars.

Six times per year the Netherlands-based foundation has a competitive
call that allows organizations, groups, individuals, universities and
companies worldwide to submit proposals for financial support of their
projects. At the moment, dozens of projects and organizations are
supported financially. Amongst them: research laboratory NLnet Labs,
the Free Software Foundation, ThinkQuest, Intelligent Interactive
Distributed Systems, and the Internet Society.

-------------------------------

Not for publication:

More information:

Michiel Leenaars
Strategy manager NLnet
Kruislaan 419
1098 VA Amsterdam
Netherlands

Phone: +31 (0)20 8884251
Cell phone: +31 (0)6 27050947
m.leenaars [at] nlnet.nl

*********** Detailed overview of awarded projects*********************

The winners of the August 2007 call are:

1. AG Projects B.V., Haarlem, with its project 'Implementation of an
open source MSRP relay (OpenMSRP). This aims to provide a reference
server side implementation of this key component of SIP SIMPLE (SIP for
Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions). The project
contributes to the convergence of SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) and
instant messaging.

2. Gendo B.V., Leiden, with its project 'FLOSS ambassadors'. In the
course of this project Free/Libre Open Source Software ambassadors will
be educated and trained by Gendo in order to disseminate open source
philosophy and methods among not-for-profit organisations, SME's and
local governments.

3. OpenOffice B.V., Amsterdam, with its project 'Consumer Advisory
Information on Electronic Communication'. This project concerns
investigation of the structure of the information offered to the Dutch
consumer by consumer organisations.

4. CAcert, Inc., New South Wales Australia, receives funding for
meetings of its new board of directors and the advisory board. The new
board has a number of challenges to resolve for the free certificate
community like external audit for the purpose of inclusion of the root
certificate in the root lists of most important browsers, new data
centre in The Netherlands, licensing of the code according to the GPL
license, financial self-sustainability, and some other important topics.

5. KennisLand, Amsterdam receives sponsoring for the conference
'Improving Access to Public Services' to be held in The Hague. The
purpose is in the course of the conference to compare real world
examples of innovations with current public management theory in the
hopes of creating a deeper understanding of the current state of
service delivery for citizens of plural societies around the world.

6. Dyne.org and Bricolabs, Amsterdam, get sponsoring from NLnet for a
Dyne:bolic workshop by Jaromil Denis in Indonesia, Singapore and India.
The purpose of the workshop is to promote a no-cost alternative to
proprietary multimedia software solutions by means of the dyne:bolic
computer operating system and multimedia tool suite.

NLnet congratulates the projects that were awarded and encourages
others to apply for financial and other support by NLnet for their
projects in their next call with deadline October 1st 2007.

                             For more information see: http://nlnet.nl