Interview with Michiel de Jong (Federated Bookeeping) – NGI Assure beneficiary

Can you introduce yourself and your project?
My name is Michiel de Jong. I’m from the Netherlands, but I have also lived in many other countries over the years.

When I was working for a social network site in Spain, we had conversations among the engineers about how big tech companies are trying to get us to upload our data to the cloud instead of keeping it on devices we control. I took three months off work to prototype an alternative web architecture. I published this prototype as the Unhosted project, and it quickly got some attention on HackerNews, and people started telling me I could quit my day job and work on this project through crowdfunding. So I did, and with 6000 euros in my bank account, I moved to Berlin and committed to living off 1000 euros per month for at least six months, plus one month for every 1000 euros people would donate to the crowdfunding campaign.

We raised 4000 euros so that I could work on the project for ten months. But then someone put me in touch with NLnet, which was, at the time, already running a predecessor of the NGI program. They funded me as an independent open-source engineer for about five years.

The Unhosted project was a big success, and I also co-founded a few related projects, like Terms of Service, Didn’t Read, and Indie Hosters. Since then, I have intermittently worked as an employee at Mozilla, Ripple, and Inrupt, but I always return to independent open-source development whenever possible.

In 2020, I started Ponder Source, a non-profit software engineering company that had nine full-time team members at its height (last year). However, during the past year, I moved back from team management to software development since I love doing it.

Over the years, I contributed to nine projects funded by NLnet and NGI Zero: Unhosted, remoteStorage, LibreDocs, SocketHub, ToS; DR, ToS; DR-OTA, Solid-Nextcloud, Open Cloud Mesh, and Solid Data Modules. These projects were related to open-source personal data stores such as Solid and personal cloud servers such as Nextcloud.

I was also part of the advisory committee for the NGI DAPSI program on data portability (now concluded).

More recently, I developed an interest in Federated Bookkeeping and worked on four related NGI-Assure-funded projects: Peppol for the Masses, Federated Timesheets, and Federated Task Tracking with Live Data, which we just finished today!

I hope to work more on inter-app interop, data portability, federated bookkeeping, and collaborative finance.

What are the key issues you see with the state of the Internet today?
I think the internet itself (as a data network) is mostly fine. There are some worries about net neutrality, but from what I’ve heard and read, they don’t have a big impact on our human freedoms yet. What I’m more concerned about are the internet applications offered to us by big tech companies.

Due to the power of capital investment, there is too much focus on building momentum around specific proprietary platforms and not enough on making these platforms interoperable.

And I think this will get worse with the addition of AI:

• One part of that will be further gravitation towards monolithic systems, which can be better personal assistants because they know everything about you.
• Another aspect might be “investment” turning into an acting power that is increasingly separate from “investors” as (groups of) human beings.

Our pension funds will increasingly be run by AI technology, maximizing shareholder returns more efficiently. There may even be AI viruses
(autonomous artificial proprietors) that don’t pay out dividends to any group of people but just play the capitalism game on their own.
But on the bright side, since proprietary technology cannot be shared, each new company must rewrite it, so this limited sharing scope limits its growth. Open source software doesn’t have this problem: each piece of code needs to be written and published only once, in theory.

There is also some duplication in practice since the same software building block sometimes needs to be written in each new programming language. Still, fundamentally, whereas proprietary software creation is recurrent, open-source software creation is accumulative.

How does your project contribute to correcting some of those issues?
My projects mostly try to build open-source prototypes of a more connected and distributed vision for internet applications, accompanied by protocol specifications and test suites documenting how this new software interacts with itself and other compatible software. Such open protocols include Solid, Open Cloud Mesh, and AS4-Direct.

Apart from prototype software, protocols, and test suites, I aim to develop connectors and bridges that can interoperate with existing systems.

What do you like most about (working on) your project?
I want the freedom to work on software I believe in without getting pushed in a user-unfriendly direction by venture capital. I also want the knowledge that I’m contributing to something idealistic and more long-term than if I were working as a software engineer at a company developing a proprietary system for commercial gain.

Where will you take your project next?
After the summer holidays, I will interconnect various Collaborative Finance networks, build a more open internet with open protocols and open-source software, and focus on tools for projects explicitly looking for post-capitalist ways of organizing the economy. I’m looking forward to it and curious about what this future research will bring and teach me!

How did NGI Assure help you reach your goals for your project?
Without NGI funding, I would have had to work as an engineer in a commercial company. I would have had to work on what I think are the more important technology developments in my spare time, and most of the projects I currently work on would not even exist if it weren’t for NGI!

Do you have advice for people who are considering applying for NGI funding?
If you doubt whether taking a sabbatical from your professional (commercial) career as a software engineer is the right next step for you, I can only say, in 100% of cases, just do it!

Especially with NGI funding, you don’t have a reason not to work full-time on your open-source software project. And once you do and get noticed in the world of open protocols and give presentations at open source conferences and elsewhere, even if you just do it for a one-year career “break,” your career opportunities will be much better than they were before.

Running your open-source project will show recruiters that you have a vision of the state of the internet, know how to write code that works, and stand out from the crowd🤩​

Do you have any recommendations to improve future NGI programs or the wider NGI initiative?
I like the two-month cycle that nlnet uses, where applying for a 50,000 euro grant for an existing open-source project will probably only cost you one day of work.

💫More NGI programs should follow this lightweight model!💫