The EU, the US and Canada share the values of democracy, human rights, the rule of law, and economic and political freedom, and have overlapping foreign policy and security concerns. Close cooperation and strategic relations with the US and Canada remain a priority for the EU. The Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative supports this vision of building bridges internationally, especially with the US and Canada. In fact, there have been many initiatives since 2016 focused on enhancing collaboration and cooperation in the development of NGI technologies, services, and standards with the US and/or Canada. The advancement of emerging topics for the EU NGI and corresponding US and Canadian programmes such trust and data sovereignty, digital identity, internet architecture renovation, decentralised technologies and standards, it is of outmost importance to shape the future Internet.

In this context, NGI Sargasso’s mission is to catalyse transatlantic collaboration on the development and experimentation of new ideas, implementation of prototypes, and contribution to standards and open-source communities on technology trends with the potential to reshape tomorrow’s NGI technologies and services. The project will run five open calls for proposals, attracting +300 EU + US and/or Canada teams working on emerging topics for the Next Generation Internet, and will support up to 96 projects that will be benefited from both equity-free funding and capacity building services in a 9-month programme.

The consortium is led by the European Science Foundation (an EU association with a network of over 40,000 experts across all scientific disciplines and over 83 countries), and counts with the support of MWCB (an ecosystem builder driving the digital advancement of society), SPLORO (whose team has been part of different NGI projects, including the EU-US fellowship programme NGI Explorers), and AUSTRALO (leader of the community building in NGI Explorers and Think NEXUS), as core partners.