DISQU Disquotient

Everyone is talking about digital sovereignty. Unfortunately, depending on who you ask, the definition varies wildly. Too often, organizations focus only on partial aspects of the concept, paving the way for "sovereign washing" rather than true independence.

The DISQU Disquotient standard was created to cut through the noise and provide a definitive way to evaluate the digital sovereignty of IT infrastructures. It addresses digital sovereignty holistically, breaking down all relevant aspects into concrete, measurable criteria to establish an objective baseline.

Repository Structure

The standard is organized into directories, with each directory representing a specific category or sub-area of digital sovereignty. Inside these directories, you will find individual Markdown files containing the specific criteria.

To ensure the standard remains highly readable for humans while still being parsable by machines, every criteria file strictly follows this internal layout:

1. YAML Header: Located at the very top, containing baseline metadata (criterion's ID and weight).
2. Title: A first-level heading (#) stating the exact name of the criterion.
3. Description: A second-level heading (##) followed by a human-readable explanation of the criterion's intent and context.
4. Evaluation Matrix: Another second-level heading (##) followed by a two-column table with header: The first column shows the scoring points from 0 to 5. The second column provides a human-readable explanation of the exact conditions that must be met to achieve that specific score. Only exception is the metric regarding Open Source Community activity: there is no description of the scoring, as this is more complex defined by the Open Source Community Monitoring standard.

How weighting works

Each criterion is systematically applied to the relevant components. The assignment of points is based on the degree of fulfillment of the stored descriptions. The rating levels are cumulatively designed: To a higher score (e.g. 5 points), the requirements of all previous levels (1 to 4), must be fully met.

To get the overall result of the quantification, the weighted average of the results of all sub-areas. The weight value of each sub-area can be found in the YAML-header of the _index.lang.md as weight. Those weights are absolute numbers. To perform the weighted average calculation, the sum of all weights has to be calculated first by iterating over all sub-areas.

To get the result of a sub-area, the same weighted average calculation has to be performed for the criteria included in this sub-area. The weights of the criteria are stored in the YAML headers of each criterion .md file. Like for the sub-areas, those weights are absolute numbers. So you have to get the sum of all weights in this specific sub-area before the result of a sub-area can be calculated.

As several parts of an infrastructure are more critical than others, the components can also be weighted. The weight for each component is therefor based on the acceptable downtime of this component:

Weight	Acceptable downtime
1	This subcomponent is not necessary for business continuity; rather, it serves merely as a tool (e.g., for analyzing user behavior).
2	An outage lasting more than one week is unacceptable without causing significant disruption to business continuity.
3	An outage lasting more than one day is unacceptable without causing significant disruption to business continuity.
4	An outage lasting more than 1 hour is unacceptable without causing significant disruption to business continuity.
5	This subcomponent is essential for business continuity.

This weight is used while calculating the result of a specific criterion: The criterion is applied on each component. Those scores are combined to an weightened average using the importance based weight to get the total result for this criterion.

Contributing

The Disquotient standard was authored and will be actively maintained by DISQU for the long term. However, true digital sovereignty thrives on transparency and community input. Thus, we have published this standard and highly encourage collaboration via Issues and Merge Requests.

If you would like to contribute, please note the following guidelines:

• Explain Your Reasoning: Every Merge Request must clearly outline the motivation for the change and the thought process behind it. This ensures that modifications remain comprehensible to everyone.
• Respect the Formatting: Strict adherence to the repository's folder and file structure, as well as the internal layout of the .md files described above, is mandatory.
• Vendor agnostic: The criteria should be independent on vendors. It should be possible to apply the criteria to all kind of IT infrastructure.

Version

When this standard is used to quantify digital systems, it is important to link to the version of Disquotient that was used to perform the calculation. Thus, Disquotient will be released in versions. Changes to the standard or new sub-areas and criteria are first tracked in separate branches of this repository. Several of these changes might be grouped together to a new version release. The master branch will always reflect the most recent version of Disquotient.

Disquotient version	where to find in the git repository
1.0	current head on master

Professional Disquotient quantification and certification

We believe the criteria for digital sovereignty should be open and transparent. That is why the contents of this repository are openly available, allowing anyone to read and use them for internal self-assessments.

However, to prevent "sovereign washing" and maintain absolute trust in the standard, the Disquotient name, logo, and certification seal are registered trademarks of DISQU.

When a company or product displays the official Disquotient seal, the public and stakeholders need a guarantee that the system was verified through a rigorous, independent, and standardized audit. Therefore, the official certification and the right to use the seal can only be granted by DISQU.

Prove your Sovereignty

Are you looking to have your product officially evaluated to gain a competitive edge? Or do you want to know exactly how sovereign your own organization's IT infrastructure truly is?

We are here to help. Reach out to us, and we will conduct a comprehensive quantification based on this standard. Upon successful completion, you will receive the official Disquotient Certificate and Seal to publicly demonstrate your proven digital sovereignty. If desired, we also offer continuous monitoring of your setup, actively warning you should your sovereignty posture degrade over time. Get all the details on our website.