Hi, change our focus, we've just talked about big, big, new funding for large projects.
We are a Marie and Marie from Purlotype Fund and we're here to talking about small innovation
funding.
There's this trend of infrastructure and maintenance which is super great and we're
not questioning this at all.
The context is that funders, they really like shiny things, they can show and we remember
maybe 10 years ago everyone wanted to start funding their own apps, their own platforms
whatever and in the last years people have been saying this is not good, we need to care
about maintenance, we need to care about infrastructure, we can't keep producing new stuff
for the software grave, and that's how stuff like the sovereignty fund or the sovereignty
agency was funded, how other funders that were not even in tech started writing reports
about rights and bridges, open tech fund in the US started doing more infrastructure maintenance
stuff and no question about that, that's just not our topic today.
The reason we have today is to talk about funding innovation and small projects because infrastructure
and being important, maintenance being important doesn't mean that we should stop caring
about setting up new structures and better structures to fund innovative ideas.
Innovation is often seen as a bit problematic in our communities rightfully because there
has been this software grave production, but today we want to go a bit into why it's
still important and how we can do this better.
Yeah, yours.
Thanks.
So one reason is of course that every project starts small, someday someone said we need
an open source software ticketing platform and they build it, and now you probably
all have used pretext to buy conference tickets.
Some day someone said we need a data secure period tracking app, so that one that doesn't
miss use people's data and they build it.
Some day someone said, see what she needs software to coordinate the missions and they build
it.
These projects only exist because people had their ideas and they got the financial support
to work on those ideas.
Another reason is that we want the three and open source software community in the field
to be more diverse and we want people from different backgrounds to be able to work on their
ideas.
So starting a project often requires a lot of resources, mostly time of course, but also having
in that work, knowing people who have the expertise, who can support them with specific tasks,
having the money to bring in to cover expenses like server costs, so I don't know creating
a logo and people will come from a more privileged background, often have these kind of resources
and have these kind of networks and sometimes even have the ability to live off their savings
to work on a project for six months, but not everyone does.
Another reason is because the expertise is not only in companies that have capacities for
research and development to fund your ideas, people have ideas because they navigate communities
that have specific needs because maybe they themselves have specific needs because they
volunteer because they acquire knowledge and niches that are not relevant to companies.
And if we just let companies fund innovation, we won't get that.
Examples from our funding experiences, for example, a cancer patient knows better what health
tracking up they need than a software company was thinking there is a business there, or someone
who teaches German in a school to migrants knows better what tools will be helpful for them
to learn the language, then do a language like doesn't work for anyone anyway, or to get back
to see what, only people who have actually been on these boats on the grounds know what software
is needed, they can't be a company that's just like going to be, I'm going to figure out what they need.
And these people they don't know what is needed, they also are mostly the first who know
this is needed now, so in the pandemic in 2020, one example is that we saw many tools that
emerge from civil society that were there for people to connect with each other, like all
these tool calls, all these platforms that were like trying to find new ways to connect
with each other to cause in a better way than Zoom, nobody urgently needed some blockchain
with three, whatever thing, like that's not the applications we got as funders, they wanted
these table calls, they wanted to be able to talk to their grandma who was an isolation,
they wanted people who were maybe not super power users of open source tools to be able
to use these privacy-protecting tools, they wanted to be able to work remotely, currently
and still use free and open source software, and they wanted to not risk their health
by having to go places, and that's the kind of stuff we saw, people then follow the trends
that were like set by agencies, companies, governments, and without these alternatives
to tech giants like Big Blue Button, just you next out and co, which we relied on a lot
as communities, and I won't go into why this is important because tech giants being
shared, it's like everywhere at first them, but like that's also a thing.
So now that we've gone over this, why this type of funding is so important and before
we go into it, how to make it work and to share our suggestions with you to fund small
only-singe projects, we want to give you a bit of context to where we come from and
why we have learned about these things, so we both work at prototype fund, which is a
German-free and open source fund, it's a project by the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany,
and it funded by the Federal Ministry for Education and Research in Germany.
In the nutshell, we have funding periods of six months, we had 16 rounds of funding in
now eight years, and we had approximately 25 projects per round.
Those project, the maximum of 47,500 euros per funding, were funded 387 projects and
all of those rounds.
The last one is the 16th round, which will be ending this month, and we spend a total,
we could grant a total of 16.6 million euros in funding for those projects.
For the six, part of those 16 funding rounds, we received over 4,000 applications in total,
and we've read them all.
The idea of prototype fund is to have a lightweight funding structure that allows the maximum
of people to participate in it, so we fund people, yeah, we fund people of small teams,
no companies, no institutions, and we, for example, have a very short application form,
where we give them support with the admin stuff, with the ministry, and we have little
to review the reporting.
For funders, this is a bit fundamental, technical as the word, but we are what funders call
a hint on funder.
That means we're not that funder that is going to tell you, here's a bunch of money, we
like your project, and in two years, your reports and have fun, and then we'll find a bunch
of holes in your report and ask you a lot of questions.
What we do is that we're closely in touch with the people we fund all the time.
We do regular short updates per email, per web, a chat platform, we do one or one calls,
we need it, we check that everything's going all right, we offer extra coaching, with coaching
partners, thematic workshops about how to build a brand around a product like logo,
colors, et cetera, or how to build a community, or how to set up a company if you
want that.
We don't think it's necessary, but some products can use it.
We also try to put grantees in touch with each other, and besides this, the focus is
on giving the people as much space as possible for them to experiment.
This means, for example, our payments are not milestone-based, but they are based on
the people work.
If they have a certain milestone where they have issues where it takes longer than usual,
that's not a problem because they get the pay for the hours they work in it, no matter what,
and that makes it possible for them to keep working without getting in financial trouble.
They also encourage them to change the plant milestones if they see that it doesn't
make sense anymore if they have better ideas.
For example, because they got user feedback, or they encountered some other issues during
the explosive work.
Last but not least, we always call ourselves learning program.
Officially, we're a research program.
I've said that in the Q&A, if you've been here for a few hours, so we're funded by the
Ministry to research how to fund open source and what the trends and open source are, and
by doing that, we also can fund free and open source projects.
Because we keep doing this research, we also get a lot of feedback, and so we keep updating
the program in the way we support projects, because they keep telling us what we could
do better, and we have this constant loop of changing the program and editing and making
it more adapted for the projects.
To just give you a short glimpse of a few projects, we found that this one is actually
the period of tracking app I've talked about, which has a big focus on data security.
It's called drip.
We can recommend that.
The next one is an Excel-collective, so this is a next-slowed app that came from a community
that was more house-projectish, and they wanted to be able to organize themselves by having
some kind of knowledge-based in their next-slowed link with their documents, markdown, down,
etc.
This turned out to be very useful for next-slowed, because this is also something that
has a business case where companies can use this internally, so it made a lot of sense.
They actually now work at next-slowed, and they can keep maintaining their loop thing
for their community, but also making it bigger and have a sustainable model of continuing
doing that.
Another great example is open-cran ticketing.
Maybe you've let them also here at the railway track, I think.
It's a trend taking itself with a smaller railway companies, and they actually got the
idea to stop this project, it forced them last year, where they heard a talk about the need
to have such projects.
And last but not least, we found it's something called OpenMLS.
It's the first open-source implementation of a standard code, a message in layer security.
It's been funded by pretty much every funnel in the book since.
It's basically next-generation signal type of encryption to put in a nutshell, and also
we have this slide, because we really...
That, when our funding is fired, we're currently in the 16th and last funding round.
We knew there was time to change something up, and we've learned a lot in the past
years, and we didn't feel like it would be a good idea to keep doing the same and go
to the ministry and make a proposal, where it's just that.
So we talked to other funders, we talked to the...
Set for working on these things that are not doing code.
And because it's extremely rare, and if not impossible, that one single person has all
the skills doing the user interface, the community buildup, we need to fund teams and
put team members who don't write the code.
This can be designers, this can be project managers, this can be medical experts in various
fields, for example, if you take the cancer app, you should have medical expert in the
team.
And those people are as important as the people who write the code, and they deserve
to be considered and paid as well.
And something that may be very basic, but is not always easy to take into account is that
software communities don't stop at borders.
There's a particular complicated, because funds are often only available in specific
geographic regions, because they're from a regional private funder, they come from the
government, and that often doesn't work for teams who are in different countries, and
if you fund only part of the team, that can create imbalances, because some people have
more time to spend on the project, they can have more hours, they can work, when there
is maybe in another region, and that can prevent the project from running smoothly.
And as already said, where some people that are getting funded already have a wide network,
they have a lot of expertise, a part of communities, not everyone is, and a lot of people
and innovation funds, like ours, are just getting started in the field, and are just
getting started with the project, and providing them only money doesn't work for the project
to be successful, but they need coaching, they need opportunities to talk to the red people,
to talk to experts, and share the knowledge, and having all this funding structure can make
a huge difference in the success of a project.
We then put it first in the list, but it's actually the one answer that we get the most
when asked people what do we need from us, and they always say, more time.
We didn't put it first, because we're not sure it's actually the most important one, or that
there is a limit to how much more time people need. And time can't solve anything, right?
Like if you don't have the expertise for various things, having more time is not going to make it.
We still should acknowledge that our funding times as innovation project programs are most
the rather short times, in our case it's been six months for the last eight years,
and in a context of whether it's lack of support, it's not that easy to get the next fund,
it's not that easy to get to a second stage type of funding where you have a prototype,
but it doesn't really work that well. That funding is the worst funding to try to find,
because there's not really someone who wants to pick up that work. And in that context,
then you're sorry thinking about more time actually makes sense, and we're thinking more than
code and more time combine at the same time and having second stage funding where it's something
that is not only coding is very helpful to projects. And in the end, like something that is also
needed in that time thing is long-term planning. We get so many people who come and say,
on the first day I have six months now to build my project, and on the last days they say,
now I have to figure out how to make it sustainable. And that is something where like funders need
to support projects and tell them on the first day, this is not going to work. You have to think about
this, and we don't really care if you want to start a company, if you want to build a community
around the project, if it's something that is going to be integrated in Linux kernel and you don't
want to touch it ever again, it doesn't matter that you have to figure out what works for you,
and you have to start to do that first, because reaching out to funders, reaching out to
communities, reaching out to people who can support you, takes time. And I think the last thing is,
we have said we quite hands on and that contradicts a little bit a little bit, but funding structures
need to be as flexible as possible. It's some like funder problem that we always think we can
micromanage people into doing the things they should do. And mostly, as we said, they are the experts,
they know what they should do, and trying to have funds that are as flexible as possible within
the friends of course, as government funding, etc, in our case. At least being open to feedback
and try to adapt the fund to your community, to the people you fund, that's one really important point.
So we don't think we all got to figure it out, and there's many different ways to build
helpful funding structures, but if you're interested in how we set up the continuation of
Prototype Fund, you can take a look at our website where we have with all written up, we have a timeline,
you can find it under new.prototypefund.de.
Yeah, there's one last thing we want to say, we're super happy to go out Prototype Fund
and our program and our grantees and all that stuff. But one thing we're super super happy about
is when people come reach out to us and say, I want to help set setting up a new funding structure
in my country, in my community. It doesn't need to be government funded. There are different ways
to do it. Prototype Fund has been copied in Switzerland. It's called the Prototype Fund. Switzerland
has the same logo as us. It has the same vibe, but it's not funding by your government. It's funded by
Macata in Switzerland with a foundation. Other funds have been funded built on Prototype Fund type models
in totally different ways where you wouldn't recognize the influence, but taking that kind of
I want to have a lightweight funding structure and I want to somehow make it work for the system
in which I work for the community in which I work. It's great. We don't think we should keep
boring growing. We think we need a lot of small funders that kind of complete each other. We
need the big ones to pick up big projects, but we need also funders that are adapted to different
needs. I recently went to Paris to open source experience to talk about the Prototype Fund and one
of the things that stayed in my mind is that at some point there was people talking about the
sovereignty agency and Prototype Fund and whatever and someone from France was like, why is
all the Germans doing that and where are our funds? We are happy to help if someone is interested
and not only in France. So if you know anyway opening, it doesn't need to be government, but like
set up that kind of lightweight fund. We've done it for a very long time. We've made a lot of
mistakes. We've learned a lot and we're happy to share. And then we don't want a single point of failure.
Trump is back. The Open Tech Fund died last time when he was there. In the last weeks,
the first open source grants have been cancelled or half cancelled. It's complicated.
And we need also these big structures like OTF or the Sobentek agency, but we need to set
up resilient structures. So one of us can fail if there is a political problem, if there is a
funder that stops funding project and we need to be able to keep the money flowing whatever happens
in open source. And now that there has been all these questions about whether and how they keep
existing, it keeps happening and there will be these pushes and we need to build these resilient
structures. If you want to get in touch, whether it is to build the new prototype or not
whatever you want to call it. If you're interested in our projects or whatever, you can get in touch
with us and we're always happy to support as much as we can. Thank you.
I think we have five minutes for questions.
Yes.
This is about how our criteria for choosing projects we fund evolve. One thing that is a really
big change is that we have four areas of funding security infrastructure, data literacy and
civic tech and from now we'll be focusing on the infrastructure and security thinking our
type of funding structure is not adapted to support projects that are very heavily content based
like stuff where you have to either scrape a lot of data and keep it up to date because that
keeping up today's question is not something we can fall with the funding that ends and where we
have no solution to keep going. I think the rest is like very soft that we probably don't notice it
but we've been learning like that when people are very vague in some like answers and applications.
For example, what's your target audience and how you reach to them? Yeah, all the users of the
internet and I'll go to conferences. We are very cautious with that kind of stuff and probably more
than we used to be where we said, okay, let's give this project chance anyway.
We have a question there.
So technically we don't decide who's found that's sorry. So what did government try to
influence how we found projects? So technically we don't even decide the Ministry does.
So our projects are not funded by us. They're funded by the Ministry. Our jury makes a list of
projects that are suggested for funding and the Ministry of Perseum. In fact, I think twice a project
was not funded. One of them was compliance reasons. The Ministry was not allowed to fund it and I
one of them was a bit more of a combination that went very public. There was a lot of tweets about it.
And there was a discussion about like how this happened. It was a bit too complicated for now.
So it's happened but very, very few times.
Yes, have a question there?
Okay and so that's like a question about who we found. Does the project needs to be somehow
related to the German market and does the person need to be in Germany?
The person is a complicated thing. If you're applying alone, you need to be in Germany. If you
are applying with the team, some members of the team can be in other EU countries, but you should
be somehow able to start a lightweight German company called the GBR, very technical, but like
basically your team is fine. Does it need to have something to do with Germany? Not directly
as in we've funded a lot of product with global reach, but if someone comes for like,
this is a product for a very specific country based in a totally different continent, then the
Ministry is going to be like, can it be a bit of a broader use case? But otherwise we've been
funding projects that were like global projects. One short question, yes?
So if we collaborate with programs on other continents, we don't know a lot of
programs that have scenarios, but we don't do no a few, and we aren't touched with them.
Okay, so let's have a couple and talk about it. We always like to check, like of course we are in the
this German structure and there are things we can do and cannot do, but learning from each other
and that kind of stuff always. I think, very very short, five words, questions, something?
Do the Ministry, does the Ministry take shares in company that have been cited? No, not at all,
because we fund research projects. So people have been researching whether it's possible or not to
do that. The Ministry is actually really happy if people start a company and
yeah, actually the only thing is they need to have a ministry logo on their website
because it's been funded by the Ministry and it needs to be open source and therefore
then the Ministry lets you do whatever you want.
Thanks you everyone, I think we're out of time.