Digital Sovereignty Index

Whether it’s about protecting sensitive data, avoiding vendor lock-in or ensuring democratic control over infrastructure, the debate around digital sovereignty is gaining momentum. But how sovereign is a country’s digital infrastructure in practice?
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The Digital Sovereignty Index (DSI) aims to provide a comparative snapshot of visible, self-hosted infrastructure across borders. It doesn’t measure intent or regulation – it shows which tools are actually in use.

The DSI score represents the relative number of deployments of self-hosted productivity & collaboration tools per 100K citizens, compared to other countries.

The principle is straightforward:

We selected 50 of the most relevant self-hosted tools for digital collaboration and communication. These include platforms for file sharing, video conferencing, mail, notes, project management, and more.

We then measured their real-world usage by counting the number of identifiable server instances per country.

The result is an index score per country. It’s not an absolute measurement of sovereignty, but it offers a strong signal: where citizens and organizations store their data on their own servers rather than rely on a few monopolized services, digital autonomy is more than just a political aspiration.

What is the Digital Sovereignty Index tracker?

What is it?

The DSI is a simple metric to illustrate how much locally hosted applications are used across the measured countries. It represents the relative amount of deployments of self-hosted productivity & collaboration tools per 100K citizens, compared to other countries.

What does it include?

It includes tools for file sharing, communication, project management, mail and collaboration. Based on server-level data, it highlights where sovereign alternatives are gaining ground – and where they remain marginal.

What it gives?

Each country receives a DSI score between 0 and 100. The higher the score, the more visible deployments of sovereign infrastructure we observed in that country, compared to the other countries we track.

How do we calculate the Digital Sovereignty Index?

We use data from the internet scanner Shodan.io, a search engine for publicly accessible servers. For each of the selected applications, we count the number of IP addresses per country that visibly run the software (based on html signatures and metadata). We then:

Calculating server count

Adjust for population size, calculating server count per 100,000 inhabitants.

Normalize values

Normalize values across countries and tools, so each tool has equal weight in the index

Get the score

Average the normalized scores across all products to get one overall score per country

Group tools

Group tools into categories (e.g. file storage, communication) to show strengths and weaknesses per area

The result is a transparent, replicable index that reflects the observable, relative number of deployments of self-hosted applications in each country.

Limitations and caveats of the Digital Sovereignty Index

The DSI is not a perfect measurement – it’s a directional signal, not a definitive map. Several caveats apply:

  • 🏛️ Server visibility is limited: Deployments behind proxies, firewalls or private networks are not counted. Some tools are harder to detect reliably than others.
  • 🌐 Toolset is not exhaustive: We include widely used self-hosted services, but certainly we missed some! Suggestions for additional tools that are trackable in Shodan and return a significant number of results are welcome.
  • 🛡️ Location ≠ ownership: A server’s IP may be in one country, while its users or data reside elsewhere. If a country outsources hosting, its index score may fall, while a country that hosts data from other countries sees its index rise – regardless of control or access.
  • 📊 Volume ≠ usage: A visible server doesn’t mean millions of users. The DSI shows infrastructure presence, not usage intensity, amount of data stored or use in public sector and business.

We see the DSI as a starting point. With each iteration, it can become more robust – and more useful for policymakers, researchers and the open-source community. Your input is welcome!

Contribute to the Digital Sovereignty Index

If you'd like to contribute self-hosted products to track or a more accurate and complete search term on Shodan, use the form below. You can find the currently used search terms here. If you submit a new product to track, check that there are at least 200, ideally well over 1000 results globally on Shodan - otherwise the numbers really are too low to say much.

Frequently Asked Questions

Digital Sovereignty refers to a country's ability to control and govern its own digital infrastructure and data. Discover how open source solutions like Nextcloud protect digital sovereignty.

The score is a representation of the number of self-hosted productivity tools as well as a number of hosting management tools that are deployed in a country, per 100K citizens, relative to other countries. We count each product and normalize the values so the country with the largest number of deployments per 100K citizens has a score of 1, and the country with the lowest a score of 0. Then we average over all products and multiply by 100 to get a total DSI, a score between 0 and 100. We do the same for the sub-indexes. So if Finland has the highest number of Big Blue Button servers per citizen, and the same goes for Jitsi, Mumble and the other communication tools we track, its score in this category would be (6\*1)\*100=100. However, Singapore has more Rocket.chat deployments relative to its population, so Finland's score comes out short of the maximum: almost 97! Germany is second place with a score of about 60, and Singapore follows with a little over 50. Find a table with data and formulas here (note that the numbers might be slightly different from the website as the data there is more up to date). See #how-it-works

Yes! All our data and code are self hosted and available on GitHub. Pull requests and issues are welcome.