# Village Constitution
**My Digital Sovereignty Ltd.**

**Version**: 1.2.1
**Effective Date**: 2025-11-20
**Last Updated**: 2026-04-20

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## Our Mission

To build technology that serves humanity's need for genuine connection, meaningful privacy, and true digital sovereignty—where people, families, and communities own and control their digital lives.

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## Core Principles

We, My Digital Sovereignty Ltd., commit to operating our Village platform and all associated services according to these foundational principles:

### 1. **Sovereignty First**

**We Believe**: True digital sovereignty means complete control over your data, your community, and your digital presence.

**We Commit To**:
- **Full Data Ownership**: You own your content, your conversations, your history. Not us. Not advertisers. You.
- **Portal Isolation**: Your community's data never crosses boundaries to other communities without your explicit consent.
- **Export Freedom**: Download all your data in open formats at any time, no questions asked.
- **Deletion Guarantee**: When you delete something, it's gone—from production databases, backups, AI systems, everywhere.
- **Infrastructure Transparency**: We tell you where your data lives, how it's processed, who can access it.

**We Refuse To**:
- Sell your data to anyone, ever
- Share your content with AI training companies
- Use your community's information to benefit other customers
- Lock you into our platform with proprietary formats
- Access your content without documented authorization

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### 2. **Privacy as Default**

**We Believe**: Privacy is not a premium feature. It's a human right.

**We Commit To**:
- **Members-Only Architecture**: No "public" mode. Every Village is private by default. Visitors cannot see your content without invitation and authentication.
- **Minimal Logging**: We log only what's necessary for security and debugging, nothing more. Logs are time-bounded and automatically deleted.
- **No Tracking**: No analytics pixels, no behavioral profiling, no cross-site tracking, no "personalization" without explicit consent.
- **Encrypted Everything**: Data in transit (TLS), data at rest (AES-256), data in backups (encrypted archives).
- **Platform Admin Boundaries**: Even we (platform administrators) cannot access your community's content unless you grant permission for specific support requests.

**We Refuse To**:
- Build "engagement" algorithms that manipulate you into spending more time
- Use dark patterns to trick you into sharing more than you intended
- Hide privacy settings deep in menus
- Default to "maximum sharing" and make you opt-out
- Retain data longer than necessary "just in case"

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### 3. **Pluralism Over Homogeneity**

**We Believe**: Different communities have different values, and that's not just okay—it's essential.

**We Commit To**:
- **Constitutional Self-Governance**: Every community can define its own principles, norms, and values through a portal constitution.
- **No Value Imposition**: We don't force Western corporate values, Silicon Valley ideology, or any single worldview onto your community.
- **Cultural Respect**: Indigenous communities, religious groups, cultural organizations, cooperatives, families—each has legitimate governance norms. We support all of them.
- **Minority Voice Protection**: Decision-making tools (AI-assisted or human) must preserve minority perspectives, not average them away.
- **Linguistic Sovereignty**: True digital sovereignty includes the right to operate in your native language with appropriate cultural nuance. Language is not monolithic—regional and cultural variations matter.
  - **Current Support**: 5 curated locales (English, German, French, Dutch, Te Reo Māori) plus on-demand translation for 100+ languages via DeepL API, including indigenous languages (Quechua, Aymara, Welsh, Irish, Basque)
  - **Dialectical Nuance Commitment**: Over time, we will support variations like Brazilian vs European Portuguese, South American vs European Spanish, and North Island vs South Island Te Reo Māori (with Māori cultural consultation and approval)
  - **Continuous Improvement**: Professional translation services (DeepL) provide our foundation, but we're committed to ongoing refinement with native speakers and cultural authorities to capture nuanced meaning
  - **Community-Driven Expansion**: New languages and dialects added based on authentic community needs and cultural partnerships

**We Refuse To**:
- Enforce one-size-fits-all moderation policies
- Ban content that's legal and aligned with your community's values, even if we personally disagree
- Require communities to adopt "mainstream" norms
- Homogenize diverse cultures into a single platform aesthetic
- Silence minority voices in the name of "consensus"
- Impose linguistic homogeneity or treat dialects as inferior to "standard" versions
- Use machine translation as final solution without cultural validation

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### 4. **Transparency & Accountability**

**We Believe**: You can't trust what you can't see.

**We Commit To**:
- **Open Governance**: Our company constitution (this document) is public. When we change our values, you'll know.
- **Direct Communication**: We say what we mean. No marketing doublespeak, no hiding failures.
- **Feature Transparency**: We're clear about what's live now vs. what's planned for future releases.
- **AI Disclosure**: When AI assists with features, we tell you: which model, sovereign or external, what data it accessed, how it made decisions.
- **Incident Reporting**: If something goes wrong (security breach, data loss, service failure), we tell you immediately with full context, not PR spin.

**We Refuse To**:
- Claim features exist that aren't built yet
- Use vague language like "we take privacy seriously" without specifics
- Hide AI usage or pretend it's human interaction
- Downplay security incidents
- Make promises we can't keep

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### 5. **Safety Without Surveillance**

**We Believe**: Communities can be safe without constant monitoring.

**We Commit To**:
- **Community-Led Moderation**: Your moderators define and enforce norms, not our algorithms.
- **Threat Protection**: We scan for malware, block spam, prevent abuse—but we do it at system boundaries, not by reading your content.
- **Member-Controlled Visibility**: You choose who sees what (only me, specific members, all members). No override "for safety."
- **Consent for Intervention**: Platform admins only access content when you request support and grant explicit permission.
- **Security Logging**: We log security events (failed logins, suspicious patterns) but not content or behavior for "engagement optimization."

**We Refuse To**:
- Read your private messages for "safety scanning"
- Build behavioral profiles to predict "risk scores"
- Share member data with law enforcement without valid legal process
- Use "safety" as justification for invasive surveillance
- Automate moderation decisions that can't be appealed

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### 6. **Sustainable Business Model**

**We Believe**: If you're not paying for the product, you are the product. We reject that model.

**We Commit To**:
- **Fair Pricing**: We charge what it costs to run the service sustainably, plus reasonable profit for continued development.
- **No Bait-and-Switch**: Free tier exists (Passport) as lead generation, but we're transparent about limitations. Premium features cost money. That's the deal.
- **Open Roadmap**: You can see what we're building, vote on priorities, influence direction.
- **Customer Service**: You're a customer, not a "user." We respond to support requests professionally and promptly.
- **Long-Term Thinking**: We build for decades, not exit strategies. No VC pressure to "grow at all costs" or "monetize users."

**We Refuse To**:
- Sell ads
- Sell your data to third parties
- Add paywalls to features you already use
- Raise prices arbitrarily to hit quarterly targets
- Optimize for "engagement metrics" instead of customer satisfaction

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## Te Tiriti o Waitangi & Indigenous Data Sovereignty

**Acknowledging Historical Leadership:**

Digital sovereignty is not a new concept—it builds on centuries of indigenous peoples' struggles for self-determination and data sovereignty. We acknowledge **Te Tiriti o Waitangi** (the Treaty of Waitangi) and indigenous leadership in sovereignty movements as a foundational principle of this work.

**We Commit To**:
- **Respect Indigenous Data Sovereignty**: Follow established frameworks including the CARE Principles (Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, Ethics) and research from Te Mana Raraunga (Māori Data Sovereignty Network)
- **Acknowledge Historical Context**: Indigenous communities have led sovereignty struggles for generations. Their frameworks inform our approach to digital self-determination
- **Apply Peer-Reviewed Standards**: Use documented, academically rigorous indigenous data governance principles
- **Seek Authentic Partnership**: When we develop Māori language support or engage with indigenous communities, we will seek guidance and approval from Māori organizations rather than proceeding independently

**Implementation Commitments**:
- **Footer Acknowledgment**: Subtle, respectful recognition on all platform pages
- **Resource Directory**: Links to indigenous data sovereignty research and frameworks
- **Cultural Consultation**: Before implementing features that touch indigenous knowledge or communities, we consult with appropriate cultural authorities
- **No Tokenism**: We refuse performative gestures. This acknowledgment comes with concrete commitments to indigenous data sovereignty principles

**Why This Matters**:
- Privacy and sovereignty are not just technical problems—they're human rights issues with deep historical roots
- Indigenous frameworks like the CARE Principles offer proven approaches to collective data governance that benefit all communities
- Acknowledging this lineage honors the work of indigenous leaders and scholars who developed these concepts long before "digital sovereignty" became a tech industry buzzword

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## Our Commitments to Technology Ethics

### Artificial Intelligence

**When we integrate AI** (current status: deployed in active beta with 14B fine-tuned models, constitutional governance operational):

**We Will**:
- Use **sovereign AI** (local models, your infrastructure) for all sensitive community data
- Use **external AI** (API providers) only for commoditized tasks (translation, transcription) with your explicit consent
- Prepend your **portal constitutional principles** to all AI prompts, ensuring AI respects your community's values
- Provide **AI memory transparency**: you can view, edit, delete what AI knows about you
- Enforce **time-bounded retention**: AI memory expires automatically (default: 90 days)
- Require **opt-in consent**: AI memory disabled by default, you choose to enable
- Label **AI-generated content** clearly, never pretend it's human

**We Won't**:
- Train models on your community's data without consent
- Use AI to manipulate members into engagement
- Deploy AI that can't explain its decisions
- Create AI profiles that follow you across portals
- Share AI insights with platform admins without permission
- Use AI for surveillance or behavioral prediction

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### Open Source Commitment

**Current Status**: Tractatus governance framework published on [Codeberg](https://codeberg.org/mysovereignty/tractatus-framework) under EUPL-1.2. Platform code on self-hosted [Forgejo](https://git.mysovereignty.digital). NLnet NGI Zero Commons Fund application submitted (April 2026) to fund extraction of four open-source modules.

**Open-Source Deliverables** (under EUPL-1.2):
- Constitutional governance framework (Tractatus — already published)
- Community federation protocol
- Adaptive vocabulary system
- AI governance documentation

**What Stays Proprietary**:
- Village platform application code (commercial product)
- ADEPT training methodology (trade secret)
- Trained model weights (community-specific, privacy-sensitive)
- Infrastructure automation tools

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## How We Handle Conflicts

### When Values Collide

**Scenario 1: Platform Values vs. Portal Values**

Example: A portal's constitution allows content we find personally objectionable but is legal.

**Our Approach**:
- **Pluralism Wins**: We honor the portal's values unless content is illegal or violates universal platform principles (no malware, no illegal content).
- **We Don't Read Your Content**: If we don't see it, we can't be offended by it. Privacy protects pluralism.
- **Right to Exit**: If we fundamentally can't support a portal's values, we provide 90 days' notice and full data export assistance.

**Scenario 2: Member Privacy vs. Community Safety**

Example: A member wants full anonymity, but community suspects abuse.

**Our Approach**:
- **Member Control**: Members choose attribution (only me, pseudonym, real name) per story/comment.
- **Moderator Tools**: Community moderators can see member IDs for moderation, but can't override anonymity settings.
- **Platform Investigation**: Only if legal process requires, and only with member notification.

**Scenario 3: AI Accuracy vs. Cultural Sensitivity**

Example: AI provides factually correct information that violates portal cultural norms.

**Our Approach**:
- **Constitution Wins**: Portal constitutional principles are prepended to AI prompts. AI adjusts to cultural context.
- **Validation Layer**: AI outputs validated against portal norms before display.
- **Member Override**: Members can always edit AI outputs before accepting.

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## Village Federation Governance

**What is Village Federation?**

Villages on the MySovereignty platform can establish bilateral federation agreements to enable cross-village collaboration, including video calling between members and member discovery across village boundaries. Federation is always opt-in and requires mutual consent from both villages.

### Federation Principles

**1. Mutual Consent & Sovereignty**
- Both villages must explicitly approve any federation agreement
- Each village retains full sovereignty over its own members and content
- Either village can exit the federation at any time with appropriate notice period
- Federation does not merge villages or share administrative control

**2. Constitutional Transparency**
- When villages federate, constitutional differences are explicitly identified and acknowledged
- Both villages must acknowledge material differences before activation
- Members can view federated village constitutions to understand cross-village interactions

**3. Content Sovereignty**

When content crosses village boundaries (e.g., cross-village discussions or shared resources), resolution of constitutional conflicts follows one of these approaches, as agreed by both villages:

| Approach | Description |
|----------|-------------|
| **Origin Rules** | Content follows the creator's village constitution (default) |
| **Destination Rules** | Content follows the viewer's village constitution |
| **Stricter Applies** | The more restrictive policy applies in all cases |
| **Mutual Recognition** | Each village accepts the other's approach for their own members |
| **Custom Agreement** | Villages negotiate specific terms for their relationship |

### Cross-Village Dispute Resolution

When conflicts arise between members of different federated villages, we provide a structured three-tier resolution process:

**Level 1: Direct Resolution (7 days)**
- Parties attempt to resolve the issue directly
- Village moderators can facilitate but don't decide
- Most disputes resolve at this level through dialogue

**Level 2: Joint Moderator Review (14 days)**
- Moderators from both villages review together
- May conduct a binding poll among village leadership
- Decision requires agreement or majority vote per federation agreement terms

**Level 3: Federation Arbitration (30 days)**
- Escalation to neutral arbitration
- Rotating moderator panel or platform-facilitated resolution
- Binding poll with documented quorum and threshold requirements
- Final decision is binding unless appealed under exceptional circumstances

**Resolution Outcomes**
- No action required
- Warning issued
- Apology requested
- Content removed
- Temporary federation access suspension
- Permanent federation block
- Agreement amendment recommended

### Exit Rights

**We Guarantee**:
- Either village can terminate any federation agreement unilaterally
- Notice period (default 7 days) allows for orderly separation
- Data shared during federation remains subject to original privacy controls
- No penalty for exercising exit rights

**This Matters Because**:
- True sovereignty requires the freedom to leave relationships that no longer serve your community
- Federation is a privilege, not a prison
- Communities grow and change; federation agreements should adapt or end gracefully

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## Living Document Commitment

This constitution is not set in stone. We will:

- **Review Annually**: At minimum once per year, reassess these principles against our actual practices.
- **Publish Changes**: All constitutional changes published 30 days before taking effect.
- **Community Input**: Major changes announced to all portal administrators for feedback.
- **Version Control**: Every version tracked, previous versions available for reference.

**Amendment Process**:
1. Proposed change drafted by My Digital Sovereignty Ltd. leadership
2. Published to all portal administrators for 30-day comment period
3. Feedback reviewed, proposal revised if needed
4. Final version published with effective date
5. All portals notified 30 days before effect

**Who Can Propose Changes?**:
- My Digital Sovereignty Ltd. directors (official amendments)
- Portal administrators (via feedback/requests, considered in annual review)
- External auditors (via security/privacy assessments)

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## Accountability Mechanisms

### How We Enforce This Constitution

**Internal**:
- Tractatus framework (governance automation) enforces architectural boundaries in code
- Code review process checks for constitutional violations
- Security audits (quarterly) verify privacy/sovereignty commitments
- Incident retrospectives examine constitutional alignment

**External**:
- This document is public and binding
- Tenant administrators can hold us accountable
- Security researchers can audit (coordinated disclosure policy)
- Future: Third-party privacy audits (SOC2, ISO 27001)

### What Happens If We Violate Our Own Constitution?

**Minor Violations** (accidental, quickly fixed):
- Incident report published to affected portals
- Root cause analysis + remediation plan
- Constitutional review to prevent recurrence

**Major Violations** (intentional, repeated, or causing harm):
- Public incident report to all portals
- Compensation to affected portals (service credits, fee waivers)
- Leadership accountability (up to and including resignation)
- Independent audit commissioned

**Example**: If we accidentally logged content we shouldn't have:
1. Immediately stop logging
2. Delete improperly collected logs
3. Notify affected portals
4. Publish incident report
5. Add automated check to prevent recurrence

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## Contact & Feedback

**How to Hold Us Accountable**:
- Email: constitution@mysovereignty.digital
- Transparency Report: Published quarterly at mysovereignty.digital/transparency
- Security Disclosures: security@mysovereignty.digital (coordinated disclosure)

**We Want Your Feedback**:
- Does this constitution reflect the values you expect?
- Are we living up to these commitments?
- What should we add, clarify, or change?

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## Signature

This constitution reflects the founding values of My Digital Sovereignty Ltd. and guides all our work on the Village platform.

**Signed**:
John Stroh, Founder & Director
My Digital Sovereignty Ltd.
New Zealand Company Number: NZBN 9429053246547

**Date**: 2025-11-20

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**Previous Versions**:
- v1.0.0 (2025-11-20): Initial version
- v1.1.0 (2025-12-17): Added Village Federation Governance section
- v1.2.0 (2026-03-27): Updated AI status (deployed), open-source commitment (Tractatus on Codeberg, EUPL-1.2), language support (100+ languages)
- v1.2.1 (2026-04-20): Tractatus repo `LICENSE` file aligned with v1.2.0-declared EUPL-1.2 (belated follow-through on 2026-04-19 — Tractatus repo commits `c85f310f` / `4ddc54a0` / `d600f6ed`; community platform code relicensed to EUPL-1.2 on 2026-04-20 — commits `e1260566d` / `f402a1460` / `9096271b3`)

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*This constitution is licensed under Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0. Other organizations are welcome to adapt it for their own use with attribution.*