Eight years of Prototype Fund!

What a day: on Saturday, we celebrated eight years of Prototype Fund! We are still overwhelmed by the countless impressions, conversations and moments and don’t even know where to start – but we’ll risk a brief review anyway:

We have to start with the fantastic keynote speech by Jac sm Kee: Entitled Funding Resistance: Rewilding Tech Landscapes for the World We Want, it was about a different understanding of funding: seeing it as more than just project funding, but as a tool for strengthening an ecosystem. If the goal is to make the FOSS ecosystem as resilient as possible, it helps to look at ecosystems in nature. These are always most stable when they also have a high level of biodiversity. So the question should be: how can we make the open source ecosystem more diverse? To do that, we have to get away from the idea that we are promoting strictly open source. Instead, we should always keep in mind: funding aimed at strengthening ecosystems supports people who want to fix problems and change power structures – and these people cannot be put in a simple box, but are complex individuals. We can only agree with that!
What will remain in our minds is the image of the vegans, vegetarians and carnivores: while the vegans strictly use only FOSS and condemn the use of other services, the carnivores simply don’t care which software they use. And then there are the vegetarians: they try to pay attention to what software they use and to get through digital life as ethically as possible, but they also make compromises. They keep the line of communication open with carnivores and at the same time try to broaden the “vegan niche” and make it more pleasant: Jac’s call is for many more of them. A very fitting analogy!

The whole thing was interspersed with several lightning talks and live demos, in which the various projects from the past of the Prototype Fund presented their idea and, above all, where this idea stands now. Since the funding period, projects have been discarded, continued in a different way or been redeveloped from scratch. Others have built up new partnerships and received further funding, and some have even founded organizations and hired employees. Not all of them have been developed further in a sustainable way, but quite a few have.

There was also a strong focus on networking between the projects, funding recipients and guests, and therefore plenty of time for this: whether in the photo booth, at the networking bingo, at the champagne reception and with appetizers, or just in between – there were many opportunities for great conversations, some of which we were able to conduct ourselves and many more of which we heard about.

Our own recap was also a must: among other things, it covered the wild early years, Bundesreisenkostengesetze, pizza, Lego, talks about and with the Prototype Fund, (Mega) Demo Days & Weeks, the pandemic, a so-called “foreign intelligence operation”, open source licenses, table sizes, Wi-Fi in the mountains of India, procrastination when it comes to applications, and so much more…

A big thank you to everyone who made this colorful ride through eight years of the Prototype Fund possible. Special thanks go to our team at the DLR-Projektträger and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the team from Festsaal Kreuzberg and Kochbox, our moderator Tobias Schmidt, our photographer Micha from VAYM Productions, our DJs benks and BarbNerdy, and our (sign language) interpreters: Without you, the day would not have been possible in such a wonderful way.
And of course a huge thank you to the almost 800 funding recipients with their almost 400 projects: without you, none of this would matter!