Berlin, Germany - February 4, 2026

The ELFA consortium has secured €3 million over three years to develop ELFA (Everything Local First Applications), a free and open-source, self-hostable, federated suite of applications for private workspaces and secure social networking. ELFA is designed to work offline first, with secure synchronisation when connectivity is available.

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Background: local-first collaboration

Most cloud-first applications store the primary copy of user data on remote servers, with local devices acting as temporary caches. As a result, everyday work depends on constant network connectivity and can be disrupted by outages, latency, or platform changes.

ELFA is exploring a local first model in which the primary copy of data lives on the user’s device, with changes synchronised securely when a connection is available. This approach supports offline use, improves responsiveness, and reduces reliance on central infrastructure, while still enabling collaboration across devices and users.

Scope of the ELFA suite

ELFA is being developed as an integrated collaboration tool suite rather than a collection of separate applications. The suite is designed to connect common workflows across tools, such as linking calendar events with messaging, calls, and shared notes, alongside core workspace tools including document editing and spreadsheets.

Ura Design’s role

Ura Design leads UX and Product design across the ELFA suite for the duration of the project. The work focuses on ensuring that a complex, decentralised system remains consistent, understandable, and usable in real-world conditions.

Ura Design’s responsibilities include defining shared product, UX, and UI guidelines across the suite; supporting cross-application workflows and deep integrations with partner teams; designing application-specific interfaces in collaboration with work package leads; and delivering a unified, accessible, mobile-first experience across platforms.

Consortium partners

The ELFA consortium partners are:

• NLnet (Coordinator), Stichting NLnet, Netherlands
• NextGraph Association, France
• IronCalc, Germany
• OpenBlocks B.V. (BlockNote), Netherlands
• Ananas Teknik AB (Bana), Sweden
• Argu B.V. (Atomic), Netherlands
• XWiki (CryptPad), France & Romania
• Trey Christian Cordova, Spain
• Ura Design GmbH, Germany
• Danube Tech GmbH, Austria
• 2WEBAPP (XRF), Netherlands

“People should be able to collaborate without giving up control of their data or relying on a single platform. Our role in ELFA is to make a complex system feel consistent, understandable, and usable across devices.”
Elio Qoshi, Ura Design GmbH

About ELFA

ELFA (Everything Local First Applications) is a Horizon Europe funded initiative bringing together open source teams to develop tools and shared infrastructure for local first software. The project focuses on interoperability, secure synchronisation, and reusable integration patterns that support a wider ecosystem over time.

More information: https://elfaconsortium.eu/

About Ura Design

Ura Design GmbH is a Berlin-based design studio supporting open-source, security- and privacy-preserving software through UX, accessibility, and visual design.

Media contact
Elio Qoshi
Ura Design GmbH
elio@ura.design