The manifesto defends a strong thesis: “digital sovereignty has become a slogan without a grammar” (thesis 1). The grammar this device proposes runs through a prior act: to make readable. Before judging, measure; before measuring, see. Readability is the precondition for any honest evaluation, any mapping, any informed purchasing decision.
Seven commitments organise this readability at different levels of the chain.
At the heart of the device: the publication of a Sovereignty Profile (see commitment pub-001). Seven domains, standardised public format, annual update, hosted at a canonical location on the declarant’s domain. It is the pivot commitment from which the others derive — not a label, not a certification, just a structured document that makes readable what marketing statements leave silent.
For providers, two complementary commitments. Honestly qualifying commercial discourse (see commitment pub-004): publicly distinguishing neutral multi-vendor foundation projects (PostgreSQL, Linux, Valkey, OpenTofu) from single-vendor projects with an enterprise edition (Redis Inc., HashiCorp, Elastic, MongoDB) and from closed proprietary solutions. The distinction is not a value judgement — each model has its legitimacy — but information the customer needs in order to decide. Publishing the list of strategic components with their governance jurisdiction (see commitment pub-006): this is the concrete expansion of the Profile’s domain 1, turning a declaration into a navigable mapping of the chain.
On the developers side, two mirror commitments. Documenting the jurisdiction of dependencies in professional projects (see commitment dev-002) — a README or a SOVEREIGNTY.md file that makes readable, for the team and for future readers, the country of governance of third-party bricks. Documenting one’s personal stack choices (see commitment dev-005) — on a blog, in a profile README, on a personal page — is the individual version of the same grammar: personal technical choices are quiet political acts whose aggregate pedagogy carries weight.
On the investors side (see commitment fund-003), publishing the fund’s sovereign investment thesis — how the sovereign dimension is integrated into due diligence, into selection criteria, into post-investment requirements. This makes visible, at the scale of funding decisions, the grammar the manifesto defends.
On the users side (see commitment user-001), the internal audit of dependencies is the precondition for any action: one cannot reduce one’s exposure to what one does not know. It is also the entry-point commitment on the user side, opening the way to the others with eyes open.
Taken together, these seven commitments feed a collective mapping: the observatory of gaps that the manifesto’s positive programme calls for. Each individual declaration feeds the aggregation; each mapping feeds the public investment decision, the private consortium, the European open source project.
For documentation of the current concentrations revealed by Profiles already published, see the annex Family 4 — Contribution concentration.