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Self-Sovereignty

Short Description​

Self-Sovereignty is the characteristic of every party that it is autonomous in managing and operating its owns knowledge, particularly in making decisions and deciding how to decide.

Background​

The background of our understanding of 'self-sovereignty' can be found in articles 8-10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), that state the rights of individuals regarding their privacy, and their freedoms to collect, process, store, and express information in a self-sovereign fashion, i.e. in a way that they can decide for themselves. This is without prejudice to Member States' laws that exist to protect their national security, public safety, the economic well-being of the country, health or morals or the rights and freedoms of others, or to prevent disorder or crime.

The eSSIF-Lab vision extends these rights and freedoms - within the limits of the law - to public and private organizations. Thus, we say that individuals as well as public and private organizations (that we collectively refer to as 'parties') are self-sovereign, or autonomous.

Implications​

The characteristic of self-sovereignty, that we attribute to every single party, has profound consequences. Here are a few:

Every party decides autonomously on the *meaning/definition of terms that it uses in an attempt to convey such meaning to other parties. The fact that such other parties also do this is a major cause of misunderstandings, as the same words may have different meanings for different parties. The eSSIF-Lab Terminology pattern provides a mental model and a mechanism that is aimed to detect such misunderstandings and resolve them.

Since every party is autonomous in its decision making, any argument that it uses for reaching a conclusion (decision) is subjective (=specific for that party). This implies that the kinds of data which a party needs in order to decide whether or not to commit to a transaction are subjective, as well as the data it needs in order to decide whether or not such data is valid to be used in such an argument.

Purpose​

The purpose of having the term Self-Sovereignty is to emphasize that every party is autonomous/self-sovereign and make people aware of the implications that this has.