Reports on Digital Sovereignty (actually owning crucial digital infrastructure, technologies and data) are appearing more and more often in the media. But what actually is digital sovereignty and what should you do with it as an organisation with regard to your contact with your constituency?

Changing world
It won't have escaped your attention: major geopolitical shifts are taking place. Nothing is what it seemed. This is also true in the world of software and data. The dependence on big Tech like Microsoft and Google, is increasing. Finally, there is the threat of cyber attacks and hostage taking. All risks at a time when the world is becoming increasingly digital.

How do you deal with this as an organisation? Let's take ourselves as an example.

CiviCooP has been consciously working for years to become digitally sovereign. We now use:

- CiviCRM as a CRM
- Nextcloud as document management system
- Drupal for our website
- Redmine as an issue tool
- Jitsi for video conferencing
- Matrix/Element as chat channel.

The applications are entirely in-house. We host exclusively in Europe and preferably in the Netherlands.
It was also definitely a challenge for us with a learning curve to get to grips with installing and managing these. The only thing we outsourced was our mail and calendar We use Mailbox, a German company that takes care of mail and calendar.

CiviCooP Platform
We are quite far in the process to become fully digital sovereign ourselves. We can also help our customers move in that direction with 
  - CiviCRM on a dedicated or hosted server and in combination 
  - with Drupal for website and portals and additionally 
  - an integrated Nextcloud installation for document management.
With this, your organisation will have that part of the automation under its own control and you will be digitally sovereign with this part.

For more information on this solution, continue reading here.