Privacy-respecting PIM tool: host your own contacts and calendars in a secure way
2026-08-08We propose to develop a privacy-respecting information management tool as a MirageOS unikernel. It will contain calendars and contacts. It will enable people to host their own service.
Lots of people use Google or Outlook or Apple to store their calendars and address books. This puts a lot of sensible data into the hands of big US-based corporations.
Our proposal is to enable more people to host their own contacts and calendar service. For security (minimal attack surface, memory-safe programming language) and sustainability (uses less CPU and memory) reasons we develop a MirageOS unikernel, which only contains the pieces strictly necessary - a tiny virtual machine. The strict separation of code and data means updating the code is straightforward, only affects this one unikernel, and can also easily be rolled back.
This proposal will deliver a virtual machine image, which can be reproduced (we pioneered bit-by-bit reproducible MirageOS builds in 2020). Each day we build and if any dependency or the unikernel itself changed, the resulting virtual machine image changed. This stream of images is available and can be used (and reproduced!) for installing and updating by anyone.
In 2026 we received funding through NGI0 Commons Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet program. The amount is 50_000€.
This will continue and extend our CalDAV work.