About - MySovereignty

Who's Actually Running This?

One human founder: John Stroh, based in New Zealand (Aotearoa). I'm the Company Director, CEO, Application designer, Program Manager and application tester all in one—oh, and I respond to highest priority communications from customers. I carry out all of these duties with a lot of help from Claude my AI Assistant. I do not write code, answer the majority of inbound communication (Claude does that), and obsess about safe digital concepts and the philosophical foundations that we need to understand to navigate the new worlds AI is bringing to our lives.

AI assistance: Claude (Anthropic) handles the heavy lifting—writing code, processing feedback, researching solutions. This isn't marketing speak. The technical implementation you see? That's human + AI collaboration.

Philosophical support: My older brother provides a valuable sounding board and advisor to the intellectual foundation. The ideas about sovereignty, pluralism, and governance? Those come from deep conversations about what technology should serve.

Why this works: Big Tech has thousands of engineers and still builds surveillance capitalism. We have one person + AI and we're building digital sovereignty. The difference isn't team size—it's alignment of values with execution.

What's the Catch? How Do You Make Money?

Subscription model. You pay us. We serve you. That's it.

Passport: Free assessment, €5 for full access
Village Community: From €20/month (storytelling for organizations)
Village Family: From €30/month (genealogy + community features)
Village Business: From €30/month (time tracking, invoicing for small teams)

"If it's free, you're the product."

We refuse that model. No ads. No data selling. No "engagement optimization" that's actually manipulation. You pay for the service. We provide the service. Revolutionary concept, apparently.

Long-term thinking: We're building for decades, not exit strategies. No VC pressure to "monetize users" or "grow at all costs." Sustainable revenue for sustainable development.

Why Should I Trust You?

Constitutional governance: We published a binding constitution with concrete commitments. Not marketing fluff—actual promises you can hold us accountable to.

Public accountability: Quarterly transparency reports (coming soon). Incident reporting when things go wrong. No PR spin—honest communication about successes and failures.

We're learning: Agentic constitutional governance? Never been done. Linguistic sovereignty with dialectical nuance? We're pioneering it. Will we make mistakes? Absolutely. The difference: we admit it, document it, and fix it publicly.

Te Tiriti o Waitangi commitment: We acknowledge indigenous leadership in sovereignty movements. The CARE Principles (Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, Ethics) aren't something we invented—we're following established frameworks from Te Mana Raraunga (Māori Data Sovereignty Network).

Email constitution@mysovereignty.digital if we're not living up to our commitments. We mean it.

What Happens Long-Term?

We're one human founder + AI. You deserve to know how we're building for the long term.

John Stroh, our founder, is 74. The technology platform works. The values are clear. But what happens in ten years? Twenty? What guarantees do you have that this isn't another startup that will sell your data to the highest bidder when the founder moves on?

We're establishing a Charitable Trust, pursuing indigenous data sovereignty partnerships, and building community governance mechanisms. This is currently just a plan—our personal aspiration that requires a lot more work. But we believe you deserve to know our intentions.

Read Our Full Plan →

What Makes You Different?

Not "different"—fundamentally incompatible with Big Tech.

We don't do A/B tests to increase "engagement." We build tools that respect your time. We don't average away minority voices for "consensus." We preserve pluralism. We don't treat Portuguese as a monolith—Brazilian and European Portuguese have different cultural contexts.

Core Differences:

Pluralism over homogeneity: Serve diverse communities, not extract from homogenized users
Linguistic sovereignty: Dialects matter. North Island Māori ≠ South Island Māori. We respect that.
Agentic governance: Human + AI transparency. Not "AI-powered" marketing BS—actual human oversight with AI assistance.
Constitutional commitments: Public promises, public accountability
Sustainable business: You pay us, we serve you. No surveillance capitalism.

You can't be a little bit sovereign, just like you can't be a little bit pregnant. Either you control your data or you don't. Either your community's values matter or they don't. We choose sovereignty.

Who Is This For? (And Who Is It NOT For?)

Pluralism means honest clarity about fit. We're not for everyone. That's the point.

✓ This Is For You If:

You value data sovereignty over "free" services
Your community has specific cultural/linguistic needs
You're okay with a small, transparent team
You want AI assistance WITH human oversight
You're willing to pay for privacy
You value pluralism over monoculture
You're patient with a growing platform

✗ This Is NOT For You If:

You expect 24/7 phone support (yet—we're learning)
You need enterprise SLAs today
You want your language supported NOW (we're expanding)
You expect a "finished" product
You're not willing to pay for services
You want Big Tech scale immediately
You distrust AI assistance entirely

If you're in the "not for you" column, that's genuinely okay. Pluralism means respecting mismatches.

The Agentic Organization Experiment

Human + AI constitutional governance has never been done. We're pioneering it. Here's what we're learning:

What's Working:

AI excels at code implementation, translation, pattern recognition
Human oversight ensures values alignment, strategic decisions
Constitutional framework keeps both human and AI accountable
Transparent about the model builds trust (we hope)

What We're Still Figuring Out:

How to scale personalized support with one human
When AI assistance helps vs when it gets in the way
How to validate cultural nuance in translations
What "continuous improvement" actually looks like at this scale

We're learning in public. This is the experiment: Can constitutional governance work for a human + AI organization? Can transparency about limitations build more trust than pretending to be something we're not?

What We Will NEVER Do

Our anti-portfolio—lines we won't cross, even for "growth":

We Will NEVER:

Sell your data to third parties, AI companies, or advertisers
Use your content to train AI models without explicit consent
Build "engagement" features that manipulate you into spending more time
Implement dark patterns to trick you into sharing more than intended
Homogenize cultures into a single platform aesthetic
Treat dialects as inferior to "standard" language versions
Compromise sovereignty principles for "scale" or "growth"
Use "safety" as justification for invasive surveillance
Accept VC funding that pressures us to "monetize users"
Pretend to be bigger than we are

If we violate these commitments, call us out. Publicly. We mean it.

What Are You Building Toward?

Vision: Families, communities, and small businesses own their digital lives. Not "users" to be monetized. Not "engagement" to be optimized. People with sovereignty.

We're not building products—we're building a movement. Digital sovereignty isn't a feature set. It's a fundamental shift in who controls technology and to what ends.

                    The Long Game
                    Decades, not exit strategies: Building sustainable technology for the long term
New Zealand roots, global mission: Te Tiriti context informs global sovereignty approach
Tractatus framework: Governance automation for AI (research project informing all our work)
Not just Village products: Testing models for agentic constitutional governance that others can adopt

                

Is this ambitious for one person + AI? Absurdly so. But Big Tech is the actual absurdity—thousands of brilliant engineers building surveillance capitalism. We're building the alternative. Join us if it resonates.

About MySovereignty