Supporting open source

We are a small non-profit foundation that supports a handful of engineers focusing on Federated Sharing, Federated Bookkeeping, and Bring-your-own-Data architectures. We support the development of open source technology that helps build the application-level internet where IT systems are sovereign but data is free to move between them.

Current Projects

Federated Task Tracking

Research Track: Federated Bookkeeping
In coop with: WikiSuite

In this project, we continue our Federated Bookkeeping research, expanding from Timesheets to Tasks (Issue Trackers).

Solid Data Modules

Research Track:Bring your own Data

See project home.

Terms of Service; Didn't Read

See project home.

Open Cloud Mesh

Research Track:Federated Sharing

See project home.

ResearchDrive - SRAM for SURF

Research Track: Federated Sharing

In this project, which we are proud to execute for SURF, we build a connection between two of their products: ResearchDrive and SRAM. As part of this process, we also implement Federated Groups in ownCloud.

Token-based Access for SURF

Research Track: Federated Sharing

In this new R&D project for SURF, we build a connection between three of their products: ResearchDrive, ResearchCloud, and SRAM. This will make it possible to access ResearchDrive folders from a ResearchCloud VM, if the folder was shared with the SRAM group to which the VM belongs.

Past Projects

Sciencemesh for Nextcloud and OC-10

Research Track: Federated Sharing

Sciencemesh builds on Open Cloud Mesh (OCM) to enable federation between enterprise sync and share systems. It is spearheaded by the three-year EU-funded project "CS3MESH4EOSC", to whom we as Ponder Source are proud to be a sub-contractor. We enable institutes to join the innovative "Sciencemesh" with Nextcloud or the PHP-based version of ownCloud (OC-10) as their EFSS.

Peppol for the masses!

Research Track: Federated Bookkeeping

In this project, we extend the popular "Peppol" e-invoicing network. In current Peppol a four-corner model is used wherein each participant needs to connect to Peppol via a licenced gateway. This has some advantages such as KYC assurance, but also some disadvantages (gateways can be expensive to use, they can read and even edit your business-sensitive invoice data, and the KYC system only works for legal entities from a specific list of countries).

We will follow OpenPeppol's Change Management Policy to propose "Peppol Classic + AS4 direct = Peppol Hybrid", adding an optional feature of sending an invoice straight to its recipient, identified by a WebID URL.
See our peppol-php and Peppol-for-the-masses-DEMO repos for more info.

MFA detection for Nextcloud / SUNET Drive

Research Track: Federated Sharing

For SUNET, the Swedish network of universities, we are developing an enhancement of Nextcloud: when a SAML IDP has authenticated the currently logged in user with Multi-Factor Authentication, this could be signaled to the Nextcloud server in a metadata field. We implement the ability for the Nextcloud server to read such a metadata field and allow access to MFA-only areas of the storage when it's present.

Federated Timesheets

Research Track: Federated Bookkeeping
In coop with: WikiSuite

In this project, we explore how Federated Bookkeeping would work for Timesheets (i.e., billable hours worked for a given project on a given date).

Collaborative Invoice Composition

Research Track: Federated Bookkeeping
In coop with:

The vision behind this project was that a buyer and a seller can collaborate in real-time to determine the contents of an invoice. See collaborative-invoice-composition for more details.

Engineers we Support

Mahdi Baghbani

Software Engineer

Michiel de Jong

Software Engineer / Founder

Madeline O'Leary

Software Engineer

Yashar PourMohammad

Software Engineer

Erfan Gholami

Software Engineer / Intern

Contact

If you're as excited as we are about the possibilities of Federated Data, then please be in touch! You can email michiel at pondersource dot com, connect via LinkedIn, open a GitHub issue on one of the open source projects we contribute to, or join the chat on the Federated Bookkeeping website and ask for @michielbdejong! Then we can see where the conversation leads us.

We are always excited to join a brainstorming session about your use case, free of charge.