Reading a Sovereignty Profile#

The rest of the site explains how to publish a Sovereignty Profile. This section addresses those who have to read one.

The corpus devotes most of its volume to the production of the Profile — its grammar, its seven domains, the commitments that can appear there. It says much less of the other side: what one does with the document once it is in hand. That is an editorial gap. A reader who has already made the effort to learn a format deserves to be helped to activate what they know, rather than having to rebuild a reading grid alone for their role.

The common grammar of the Profile#

The Profile is a short document, structured in seven domains — production, governance, hosting, capital, distribution, reversibility, commitments and assumed limits. It is self-declarative: it is the provider that writes and publishes it. It is dated, hence situated in time. It is contestable: moderation removes declarations whose falsehood is publicly demonstrated, and a provider that has lied will have signed its lie.

For the full philosophy of the format, see Philosophy of the device. For the detail of the seven domains, see the catalogue of domains. To browse the Profiles already published, see the public index.

Why a per-persona guide#

The seven domains are common to all readers; the questions one asks of them are not. A CIO reads the Profile to assess the operational continuity of a provider over five years. A CISO looks for the jurisdictions of capital and hosting, because they are the ones that trigger extraterritorial obligations. A public or private buyer confronts the declared commitments with what the contract will actually take up — escrow, release-on-trigger, reversibility clauses. An investor looks for the blind spots in the capital: shareholders’ agreement, golden power, anti-acquisition statutes. A journalist looks for the gaps between declaration and verifiable reality, and the trace left by a misleading declaration. A developer looks for the dependency: single-vendor, vendor lock-in, multi-vendor neutrality.

These are not cosmetic personalisations of a single reading. They are six distinct grids — six orders of priority, six families of questions, six ways of ranking what the Profile says and what it leaves unsaid.

And then#

Each of the six persona pages concludes with a basket that offers to add to a draft the commitments and domains relevant to preparing one’s own Profile — without pressure, as an opportunity offered to the reader who notices that their organisation is also, in another capacity, a provider. The draft continues in the Profile generator.