Initiating group
The Senior Advisory Council (SAC) is the initiating group of TBYD. Its members brought decades of experience from system markets, system manufacturers and high-security technology.
About Take Back Your Data
So digital sovereignty does not depend on a new provider.
Take Back Your Data is the public publication frame of an independent international expert network. TBYD publishes foundations that people and organizations can use, if they choose, to place digital effect in their own domain under a bound order of their own.
TBYD publishes. The operator decides.
Why TBYD exists
Continue using experience – without the third-party interests of an active career.
TBYD was initiated by eleven experienced professionals who have known one another for decades. After their active careers ended, they wanted to continue work on subjects they considered important, but which in professional life were always also constrained by employer, customer, market or other third-party interests.
Independent working space
After active careers, it became possible to pursue questions without career, client or commercial exploitation pressure.
Second motive
The results are not intended to remain inside the network. TBYD publishes foundations that people and organizations can use to reduce dependence on technology monopolies, if they choose to do so.
How independence is protected
Not only as a principle, but through structure.
Today more than 120 appointed experts participate in the network. Most are no longer in active employment. TBYD is not a company, legal entity, employer, vendor, consultancy, platform, operator or certification body.
Appointment, not application
New experts are personally appointed when a particular experience, discipline, capability or perspective is needed for the work. Applications are not part of the model.
Anonymity
Except for the public spokesperson, participants remain anonymous. This is intended to prevent individual experts from becoming direct targets for external influence.
Self-financing
Participants fund the work and its costs themselves. TBYD accepts no third-party funding. External funders therefore gain no financial influence position.
No economic self-interest
TBYD is not designed to turn SES into an enduring vendor, platform, consulting or dependency relationship.
Appointment, anonymity and self-financing serve the same purpose: professional work should not depend on the influence position of third parties.
Beyond technology
Digital effect arises in more than software.
TBYD is therefore not an IT-only or software-only body. The network is extended where a specific piece of work requires additional professional perspectives. Technology is one part of the work – equally important is how effect arises through people, responsibilities, rules, processes, exceptions, evidence and external systems.
Technical capability
Systems can process data, execute decisions, change states and create evidence.
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Bound effect
Whether this may become valid effect in the operator’s own effect space is a different question. That separation is fundamental to the SES work.
What TBYD publishes today
From the system type to your own machine.
The published foundations are publicly accessible. Access does not require an NDA, consulting engagement or prior individual approval from TBYD.
SES — Ex Ante Sovereign Effect System
The publicly described system type for ex-ante control of valid digital effect.
SES Universal Core
The common technical and normative foundation on which SES machines can be built.
Technical Core documentation
The technical basis of the Core is publicly documented. An independent Core-compatible implementation can be built from that documentation.
Machine Builder Method & Toolkit
Engineering methods and working instruments for scope, authority, rules, states, evidence, failure, binding, activation readiness and revalidation.
Public machine architectures
Generic C0 architectures as working references. Another operator’s machine is not PASS for your own instance.
Quality and validation material
Material for gate review, rule completeness, scope closure, evidence, revalidation and reconstructable machine formation.
The publication is not intended only to explain what SES is. It is intended to enable qualified users to work with it themselves.
Machine formation
An SES machine is closed first – and only then technically carried.
Machine formation is not structured as a software project. Appropriately qualified engineers from classical engineering, quality, process and systems-engineering disciplines can use the published foundations to form their own SES machine. Software and IT work enter where the already closed machine requires a technical carrier.
Determine effect space and sovereign
Select or form C0
Close C1 artifacts
Bind the concrete C2 machine
Implement the technical carrier
Prove C3 readiness
Form C4 productive activation
If an implementer has to decide a missing normative rule, the machine is not ready for implementation.
The operator does not need to make TBYD the sovereign or ask TBYD for individual machine approval.
Not every sovereign has to engineer formation personally.
Qualified teams may continue to self-build SES machines from the published methods and technical foundations.
For prepared SES solutions, a Sovereign SES Formation Factory Machine can carry the concrete formation of a separate Target machine — including discovery, Scope Closure, and required bindings — without acquiring Target sovereignty.
Where the sovereign must decide, the decision remains with the sovereign.
Target-domain rules do not come from the Formation Factory. A solution operator may provide defined Target rule templates; the sovereign selects/authorizes; the Factory binds.
A separate solution provider that develops or distributes a prepared or open SES solution does not thereby become the sovereign of the resulting concrete instances. TBYD remains publisher only.
Boundary: this is a formation path, not a universal SSMFF requirement and not a Target C3/C4/PASS claim.
Technical Core foundation
Public documentation instead of a TBYD provider role.
TBYD publishes the technical Core foundation. TBYD does not offer a Core implementation as a product, service, or transfer object.
Public Core documentation
The published technical foundation may be used for an independently built Core-compatible implementation.
Understand the CoreIndependent implementation
A concrete implementation lies outside the TBYD publisher role. TBYD is neither vendor, integrator, seller, nor operator.
Understand the CoreSES and Core compatibility do not create a provider, payment, or operator relationship with TBYD.
The boundary of TBYD’s role
TBYD must not take the authority that SES binds to the operator.
TBYD publishes foundations and explanations. A concrete SES machine, however, always arises in a concrete effect space under the authority of its operator.
Not the sovereign
TBYD does not determine the rules of a concrete operator instance and does not take over its authority.
Not a central operator
Productive SES effect does not need to pass through a TBYD platform, TBYD service or central TBYD instance.
No transferable PASS
TBYD cannot transfer machine PASS, activation, certification or regulatory status to an operator.
No necessary continuing dependency
The published foundations are designed so that qualified users can continue independently.
Using SES does not mean that you must use the TBYD Core.
Public communication
One public voice, but no personal decision authority.
The experts in the network remain anonymous. The public spokesperson explains published material, answers technical questions, receives objections and factual corrections, and communicates public statements when the SAC has decided to issue them. The spokesperson does not decide independently for TBYD, set rules or validate operator instances.
The public should be able to challenge statements without turning the professional work into a personality-based structure.
Self-enablement
The work is useful when others can continue on their own.
TBYD does not seek to replace one provider with another. Those who want to use the published foundations should be able to understand how SES is formed, reviewed and technically carried – and make their own decision from there.
Understand SES
Start with the system type and the separation between technical capability and valid effect.
Understand SESView machines
See public generic C0 architectures as working references.
MachinesMachine Engineering
Go deeper into roles, artifacts and the order of concrete machine formation.
Machine EngineeringTBYD publishes the foundation. The operator decides whether and how to use it.