Together with Zuyd University of Applied Sciences, DoCoNEXT, the municipality of Valkenburg aan de Geul and Jouw Advocaten, YourData Network is receiving support from SIDN Fonds and Digital Holland to develop and test a fully sovereign digital workplace. The project is one of eight initiatives selected following the themed call The transition to digital autonomy.

In brief

  • YourData Network is taking part in SOLID, a project on digital autonomy.
  • The workplace combines collaboration, storage and AI without Big Tech dependency.
  • Nextcloud, ThreeFold and self-hosted AI form the technical foundation.
  • The municipality of Valkenburg aan de Geul and Jouw Advocaten are testing the solution in practice.

In December, SIDN Fonds and Digital Holland called on organisations to come up with concrete solutions that make the Netherlands and Europe less dependent on non-European digital infrastructure and technology. Various organisations submitted proposals. SOLID, the project YourData Network is part of, is one of the eight projects receiving support to actually get started.

SOLID stands for SOvereign Local Infrastructure for Digital autonomy (in Dutch: SOevereine Lokale Infrastructuur voor Digitale autonomie). Within this project, the partners are developing and validating a digital workplace in which organisations can collaborate and use AI support without depending on foreign hyperscalers: the large international tech companies behind many digital workplaces.

Why this call was made

Digital autonomy is rising up the agenda. Not because organisations have suddenly started working digitally, but because there is growing awareness of how dependent they have become on a small number of large foreign tech companies. Documents, communication, collaboration, storage and, increasingly, AI applications run on systems over which organisations themselves have only limited control.

Recent events show that this dependency can make organisations vulnerable. In the Netherlands, political concern arose after it emerged that the names of Dutch civil servants and academics involved in implementing the European Digital Services Act had been shared with an American committee. This made it clear that digital dependency is not just a technical issue, but also affects administrative independence, privacy and the protection of public duties.

There are international examples too that make this vulnerability concrete. The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague faced restrictions after the American government imposed sanctions on him. These also affected his access to digital services. This shows how political decisions outside Europe can directly affect the digital continuity of organisations based here.

Events like these make the debate on digital autonomy more urgent. It is not only about technology, but also about control, continuity, privacy and public values. Where is the data stored? Who can access it? Which laws do digital services fall under? And what happens when political decisions outside Europe affect digital access here?

That is precisely why SIDN Fonds and Digital Holland launched the themed call The transition to digital autonomy. The aim: to support projects that do not just talk about digital autonomy, but show how it can work in practice.

SIDN Fonds is an independent fund that supports innovative internet projects contributing to a strong, safe and accessible internet for everyone. The fund was set up on the initiative of SIDN, the organisation behind the Dutch .nl domain names. Digital Holland focuses on strengthening digital autonomy in the Netherlands and Europe.

Why this matters for every organisation

For many organisations, digital workplaces from large tech companies are practical, familiar and hard to imagine doing without. At the same time, the question of digital control is becoming ever more relevant. Almost every organisation today works with data, documents, client information, internal knowledge, contracts, plans or decision-making that matter for its own continuity.

In organisations that handle sensitive data, this urgency is even more visible. A municipality deals with public services, residents’ data, policy documents and administrative processes. A legal services provider works with confidential case files, contracts, advice and client information. In environments like these, control over data is self-evidently essential.

But digital autonomy is not only relevant for municipalities, legal organisations or institutions with highly sensitive information. SMEs, non-profit organisations, educational institutions and knowledge-intensive businesses also want to stay in control of their documents, client relationships, internal knowledge and digital processes. The question of where data is stored, who can access it and on what terms technology is used ultimately affects every organisation.

Digital autonomy means that organisations use technology in which their data remains fully under their own control. Not partly, not only on paper, but genuinely in the way storage, access, management and processing are set up. After all, as an organisation you are not “a little bit” independent. You either control your data, or you don’t.

That is why digital autonomy is only valuable if it also works in practice. Organisations do not just want to know whether an alternative is technically possible, but above all whether their work processes can keep running reliably. Can employees collaborate the way they are used to? Do documents remain easy to find? Does AI support work in a safe and usable way? Is the technology stable, understandable and reliable enough for daily use?

This is exactly the core of SOLID: not only developing a sovereign digital workplace, but also testing whether it meets the requirements of organisations that need to be able to rely on their digital environment every day.

What is being developed?

Within SOLID, the partners are developing and validating a fully sovereign digital workplace. This workplace combines collaboration, storage and AI support in an environment in which organisations keep full control over their data and digital processes.

The solution consists of three main components.

First, secure storage under your own control. In technical terms, this is a distributed storage infrastructure. For this, SOLID uses the decentralised internet of ThreeFold. Instead of placing data in one central environment of a large tech company, ThreeFold makes it possible to store data in a distributed, decentralised way, within an infrastructure designed to strengthen ownership, control and independence.

Second, an open collaboration environment. For this, Nextcloud is used: an open-source platform for storing, sharing and jointly editing documents. Open source means that how the software works is transparent. As a result, organisations are less dependent on a single closed commercial supplier and can better understand and verify how their digital environment works.

Third, AI support within your own domain. In technical terms, this is called a self-hosted AI stack. It means the AI environment runs within an environment the organisation manages itself, or deliberately has managed for it. Documents therefore do not need to be sent to an external AI service.

The project also works with what is known as RAG functionality. RAG stands for Retrieval-Augmented Generation. Put simply: the AI finds answers based on the organisation’s own documents. An employee can, for example, ask questions about policy documents, legal case files or internal knowledge documents. The information stays within the organisation’s own environment and is not used to train an external AI model.

Testing in practice

An important part of SOLID is that the digital workplace is not only developed, but also validated in practice. This is happening at the municipality of Valkenburg aan de Geul and at Jouw Advocaten.

That makes the project concrete. The solution is being tested in two environments where confidentiality, care and control over data matter greatly every day.

During validation, the partners look at questions such as: do employees find it pleasant to work with? Does the solution fit existing processes? How are access, management and responsibility arranged? And what is needed to make this approach applicable to other organisations as well?

It is this practical approach that makes SOLID valuable. Digital autonomy only becomes meaningful when organisations can actually work with it.

The role of YourData Network

For YourData Network, SOLID ties in directly with our mission: helping organisations become full owners of their data and work in a more digitally independent way. We believe that real digital autonomy starts with the infrastructure on which data is stored. That is why we see the decentralised internet of ThreeFold as an important key to making that independence possible in practice.

YourData Network already helps organisations set up digital workplaces in which data is not controlled by large tech companies, but remains under their own control. We do not look at a single application, but at the entire digital chain: infrastructure, software and hardware.

At infrastructure level, digital sovereignty means that an organisation itself has control over where its data is stored. This is possible because organisations use their own nodes that are part of the decentralised internet of ThreeFold. The digital foundation is then not placed with a third party, but within an infrastructure of its own, built on ownership and independence.

At software level, we work with Nextcloud: a fully-fledged open-source alternative to services such as Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive. With it, organisations can store and share files, collaborate and manage access within an environment that is better suited to privacy, control and transparency.

Hardware is part of this too. Among other things, YourData Network supplies laptops running Linux Mint and privacy-friendly smartphones that help organisations become less dependent on American tech companies. Because digital independence does not stop at the server or the software. The device employees work on every day also determines how much control an organisation really has over its digital environment.

That is why our conviction is clear: you cannot be a little bit digitally independent. If infrastructure, software or hardware still depends on parties you have no control over, your organisation remains vulnerable. A fully sovereign digital workplace therefore calls for a coherent approach in which every component fits.

Within SOLID, YourData Network contributes this practical experience. Not as theory, but from the conviction that organisations can already work today with digital solutions that are user-friendly, reliable and fully under their own control.

A step towards an internet on your own terms

For YourData Network, this project is about more than technology. It is about who has control over the digital environment in which we work, collaborate and make decisions.

As more and more work processes, documents and knowledge move into digital systems, control over those systems becomes increasingly important. Not out of fear of technology, but out of responsibility.

With SOLID, YourData Network, Zuyd University of Applied Sciences, DoCoNEXT, the municipality of Valkenburg aan de Geul and Jouw Advocaten are together taking a concrete step towards a digital workplace in which collaboration, AI and full control over data go hand in hand.

Want to know more about what such a sovereign digital workplace looks like? Take a look at our page on the Sovereign Digital Workplace:

https://yourdata.network/sovereign-digital-workplace/

Would you like to explore what a sovereign digital workplace could mean for your organisation? Send a message to hello@yourdata.network for a no-obligation exploratory conversation.

Read also: AI on your own company data, without sharing it: YourData Network launches OwnBrain