If anyone tries to tell you that government grants play no role in technology innovation, point them to the field of software-defined networking.

And soon, you might be able to point them to open social networking.

Software-defined networking, or SDN, grew in large part out of research done at Stanford, led by professor Nick McKeown and a group of colleagues and graduate students, called the Programmable Open Mobile Internet 2020 (POMI) project.

In response to the public outcry over mass Internet surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA), the engineers who develop the protocols that underpin the Internet are deep into an effort to encrypt all Web traffic, and expect to have a revamped system ready to roll out by the end of next year.

The effort, by the Internet Engineering Task Force, or IETF, an informal organization of engineers that changes Internet code and operates by rough consensus, involves HTTP, or hypertext transfer protocol, which governs information exchanges between the Web browser on your phone and computer and the servers that hold the data of the website you are visiting.

If you buy several Internet-connected home gadgets—say, a “smart” thermostat, “smart” door lock, and “smart” window blinds—you’ll likely have to control each one with a separate app, meaning it exists in its own little silo.

That’s not how Elier Ramirez does it. In his home, an iPad app controls his lights, ceiling fans, and TV and stereo. Pressing a single button within the app can shut off all his lights and gadgets when he leaves.

TiVo was an early disruptor of conventional television-watching.  In 1999 it launched a black box that stored shows on hard-disk – the digital video recorded or DVR – making it famously easy (compared to VCRs) for people to record lots of shows and skip through ads when watching them.  But as other set-top boxes got better, and cloud-based streaming services arose, TiVo customers plunged from a 2007 high of 4.4 million customers, to less than half that today.

After an earthquake crippled Haiti in 2010, killing and injuring hundreds of thousands and destroying the country’s communication networks, Paul Gardner-Stephen found himself thinking about all the cell phones that had instantly become useless. With cell towers out of commission across the country, they would be unable to operate. “If the software on the phones was right,” he says, “they would keep working for at least localized communication, handset to handset.”