Trend Research

Under its funding priority of data security, the Prototype Fund supports software that enables the protection of sensitive information. This not only benefits particularly vulnerable groups such as activists and journalists but society as a whole.

The field of software development is not known for diversity. Many Prototype Fund projects have set themselves the task of changing this and supporting diversity through software.

Artificial intelligence is playing a role in more and more of the Prototype Fund's funding projects. Grantees use code assistants in their work, develop tools that identify patterns in documents, online videos and railway connections, uncover risks of and mechanisms behind AI systems or make them easier for developers to use.

Software development can contribute to ecological sustainability by pursuing less resource-intensive approaches or by using software to collect, analyse and present information on the topic of sustainability in an understandable way. At the Prototype Fund, a particularly large number of projects have trialled the latter.

Whether planning a public transport route, participating in a video conference or collaborating in a source code editor - there are still many contexts where barriers prevent equal participation in social life. Projects at the Prototype Fund regularly test how these barriers can be broken down using free and open source software (FOSS).

Civic Tech was one of the four funding priorities of the Prototype Fund until 2024. Civic Tech is software that enables democratic participation, for example by facilitating access to information, supporting the exchange of information between citizens or enabling their participation in political and administrative processes.

The workplace has rarely been the focus of Prototype Fund projects. However, in order to enable social participation and to protect the rights and well-being of employees, it is also important in this area that software is geared towards the common good.

Software offers new possibilities for collecting, analysing, processing and disseminating data and information. This goes hand in hand with new demands on the skills of journalists and media consumers.

An active, largely volunteer-based community is working on open source projects relating to the processing of spatial data and geodata in Germany. The Prototype Fund has also repeatedly supported projects with this focus.

In Germany, the healthcare system is an important pillar of the welfare state and is therefore supported by the general public. Software is playing an increasingly important role in this. Projects supported by the Prototype Fund show how health technologies can be used to achieve autonomy, resource efficiency and participation.

Legal tech can serve as a means of obtaining low-threshold information about fundamental rights and claims against the state or companies as well as a means of enforcing these rights and claims. Open source software has the potential to provide cost-effective support in legal matters, especially for vulnerable groups of people.