Elemental Foundation

The Elemental Foundation (in Dutch: "Stichting Elemental") is a non-profit aiming to help society be more resilient.

We do this by creating and supporting specialised software and resilient digital infrastructure.

Projects

All of these projects (including this website) are very much "under construction". Feel free to check back later to learn more.

Elemental Sync

A service where users can back up and sync their files using open-source software and European servers.

It is built on Syncthing, free and open source software that syncs files between your devices in real time, without a central server. It is private, secure, encrypted, and perfect for infrastructure that can function peer-to-peer, without relying on large enterprises.

Zerocomms (Elemental Comms)

We currently rely heavily on centralised (and often US-based) infrastructure for our communications, even during incidents. In case these fail, Zerocomms provides a backup, running on independant hardware installed in your own offices and satellite locations. It allows people in those offices to access locally cached information and communicate peer-to-peer with other locations.

It's essentially a decentralised information and communication platform, open-source and free to use by anyone.

Infolite (Elemental Information)

Often during disaster scenarios there is still some Internet connectivity, but it will be spotty and unreliable. Think 2G, not 5G. Official websites are often not made for these situations and will try to load large images and even videos, making them unusable for people in those disaster areas.

Infolite is free service that mirrors important news and announcements, but it strips out all images, videos and stylesheets, so that the website loads much faster.

Q&A

Why a foundation?

The underlying idea is that society might be more resilient if critical services were run by non-profits.

Food, water, shelter, (digital) infrastructure, health and education don't require a for-profit organisation to thrive. On the contrary, the drive for year-over-year growth and profit seems to result in services that get worse over time.

Instead, these critical services might be better served by non-profit organisations, where the employees are well compensated to provide a solid service in a fulfilling manner.

That's the big idea (and hypothesis) underlying Elemental. But our execution is much narrower in scope. Our background is in software, cybersecurity and digital infrastructure, so that's what we focus on. For now.