Achieving Participant Autonomy and Agency

Participant Autonomy and Agency, commonly referred to as Digital Sovereignty starts with control over each participants own identity. Only participants that are in control of their own identity can be truly autonomous and have the agency to act in a data space.

The Manifesto of international data spaces articulates the fundamental principles. The functional requirements section of the IDSA Rulebook details the mechanisms required to achieve this goal

Any central or federated control impairs the participant autonomy & agency, reducing their ability to act within the data space.

IDSA recommends decentralized architectures and decentralized identities (DIDs) as the preferred approach to maximise participant autonomy and agency. In practice, the DSGA may define acceptable forms of identity evidence, trust anchors, and onboarding processes as governance constraints; these are documented governance choices that participants can evaluate when deciding whether to join or interact in a data space.

DIDs and associated mechanisms are the basis for sharing attributes describing a participant and providing evidence about the claims of those attributes in a data space. The participants claims provides vital information to enable the sharing of data -- everyone needs to understand who they are sharing data with. It is the most important function within a data space. It allows the participant to exert control, to choose which data to share with whom, when and under what conditions. This ensures the participant has agency over its assets.

Instead on relying on a central party to manage authentication and authorisation participants are responsible to manage their own information and to provide this information to other parties in a standardised way.

Every participant is free to choose whether to trust the claims provided by another participant. The core of data spaces is about the mechanisms that enable the verification of participant claims to foster trust.

A core functional mechanism of a data space is the agreement on a common set of processes, reference and rules within a community of participants. The Data Space Governance Authority (DSGA) is a crucial function to support the management of the governance framework of the Data Space by establishing the policies and rules of the data space.

When evaluating different data space architectures and deployment models, the individual set of rules that serve as the basis is important. One such rule set is the book of law for the membership. When a data space operates in a regulated industry, there are laws and regulations for data sharing. In this case, it makes sense to include specific regulations in the data space policy and rule set. This provides clarity when the data space crosses legal jurisdictions or industries.

Legal requirements might lead to necessary compromises on the goal of participant autonomy and agency. They need to be evaluated carefully to reduce negative impacts on the participants.