It has been almost three weeks since the Demo Day of class 01. After Team Prototype Fund has been fully focused on the more than 450 applications for class 02 during those weeks, it is finally time to look back.
On November 28th, it was time for Demo Day again: Time sure passes quickly. We just celebrated eight years of the Prototype Fund and started switching from rounds to classes, and now six months of funding have already passed and the projects from Class 01 have presented their results and how they got there.
We found the introduction particularly exciting, in which Ksenia Ermoshina told us about resilient infrastructure. Ksenia is a researcher in the field of encryption and internet censorship at the Center for Internet and Society CNRS, Citizen Lab, and eQualitie. Using the example of Signal, which is secure but blocked in Russia and therefore unusable without technical knowledge, she showed us that resilient systems require more than just technical security.
Neal from the Sequoia PGP project also picked up on this point, emphasizing that it is not data that gets hurt, but people – so the primary goal of software must always be to protect people, with data protection being a derivative of this. That is why there is no conflict of interest between usability and security, because the latter cannot exist without the former. The other presentations took us on a journey through how to measure the energy consumption of software with another piece of software, how important three-dimensional map data is, and what diesel (which is not just a fuel) has to do with databases. Of course, there was also plenty of time to try out some projects hands-on: These included an improved algorithm for processing audio in BigBlueButton, a programming-language-to-3D-object-converter, and time series data on maps. The day was framed by panels on local-first software and FOSS infrastructures in everyday life, delicious catering, and plenty of time for discussion with the audience and the grantees.
For some projects, it's now time to dust themselves off and get back to work! In the Second Stage, they will now spend four months working on the long-term sustainability of their projects – whether through founding a business, upstream commit to a larger project, searching for partners, or building a community is up to them. We are very excited and doubly happy.
We would also like to thank our colleagues at the DLR PT and VDI-VDE/IT, as well as the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology, and Space for their collaboration, which, together with us, makes the projects' work possible. Thanks to bUm for the location and to Dinette for the delicious catering – and, of course, a special thank you to all the projects from Class 01 that made this Demo Day what it was. See you next time!
