Insights
Articles on federation, community infrastructure, AI governance, and data sovereignty from My Digital Sovereignty.
Federation is live
Start with Federation in Practice — how a small-town carpool demonstrates sovereign community infrastructure.
Federation
Federation in Practice: Community Carpooling on Sovereign Infrastructure
How a community carpool in Amberley, New Zealand demonstrates federated sovereign infrastructure. Each town controls its data, federation connects them.
Guardian Agents
Guardian Agents: How Village AI Holds Itself Accountable
What Guardian Agents do for community members — confidence badges, source analysis, and AI that shows its working. Four layers of verification built on mathematics, not more AI.
Why We Built Guardian Agents
The architectural reasoning behind Village's AI accountability system. Why "add guardrails" is insufficient, the recursive trust problem, and four design principles that resolve it.
Guardian Agents and the Philosophy of AI Accountability
How Wittgenstein, Berlin, Ostrom, and Te Ao Māori converge on the same architectural requirements for governing AI in community contexts. Four philosophical commitments that demanded specific engineering responses.
AI Governance Series
What Is AI, Really? A Guide for Community and Not-for-Profit Leaders
Core AI concepts explained in plain language — what AI is, how it works, why it hallucinates, and why community governance of AI is fundamentally different from corporate AI adoption.
Governing AI in Community and Not-for-Profit Contexts
Risk identification and baseline governance practices. The specific risk profile for not-for-profits, practical governance questions, and Te Kāhui Raraunga's Māori Data Governance Model for indigenous data sovereignty.
Models of AI Governance for Communities and Not-for-Profits
Four distinct governance approaches — from vendor-centric to community-sovereign — with explicit trade-offs and decision factors for choosing between them.
Village AI as a Situated Language Layer
How Village implements community-sovereign AI in practice — a small, locally-trained language model running on community-controlled infrastructure, understanding its specific context and values.
Stories
When Your AI Assistant Nearly Destroys What It Was Hired to Fix
The psychological dimension of AI over-trust. An incident where a capable AI assistant confidently proposed a fix that would have locked the founder out of his own community — and the automation bias that almost let it happen.