Our mission was to build an alternative, citizen-led model for the internet, by setting out an ambitious vision for what we want the future internet to look like, identifying the concrete building blocks (both policy interventions and technological tools) we need to get us there, and convening the right ecosystem to bring us closer towards our vision. This phase of the project, NGI Forward, led on from Engineroom which ran from 2017 to mid 2019.

NGI Forward was a Nesta-led international consortium made up of seven partners:

• At Nesta, we work on the vision and policy agenda and oversee the overall direction of the project.
• DELab at the University of Warsaw in Poland works on mapping emerging trends and dynamics in the internet space, using cutting-edge data science methodologies.
• Aarhus University in Denmark uses social media data to understand conversations about key internet trends, and helps identify the most important issues moving forward.
• Edgeryders (Europe-wide, e-residence in Estonia) fosters discussion between stakeholders on their exchange platform, taking a collective intelligence approach.
• The City of Amsterdam in the Netherlands brings together cities in NGI policy discussions and will host our first major NGI Policy Summit.
• Nesta Italia in Turin, Italy engages with policymakers in Italy and beyond, and plans our second NGI Policy Summit.
• Rob van Kranenburg helps convene the NGI ecosystem through regular salons and events all over Europe.

We believe the internet holds great potential to do good, but that we are currently not fully harnessing that ability. Power over the internet - from its underlying infrastructures to what we read and see - is centralised in the hands of a small number of players, who are incentivised to protect their position through anti-competitive and trust-eroding behaviour. This means fewer and fewer people are able to reap the full benefits of the digital economy or believe that it works in their interest. We want to change that.