Institutional Reference
A Common Language for Human-Centered Digital Governance across law, public policy, technology, digital architecture, and commerce.
Human Agency is the capacity of individuals to understand their circumstances, make meaningful choices, act upon those choices, and direct important aspects of their own lives.
Within the Forum's work, human agency is not simply freedom from technological interference. It also concerns whether institutions, infrastructure, and digital systems provide individuals with the practical capability to act independently and purposefully.
Digital Confidence describes a relationship of legitimate trust arising when individuals entrust digital systems with personal information, behavioral signals, interactions, or other data capable of being used to understand or act upon them.
The concept goes beyond whether data collection was technically authorized; it asks whether entrusted information—and insights inferred from it—are subsequently used consistently with legitimate expectations of fair and non-detrimental treatment.
A Breach of Digital Confidence is the Forum's proposed framework for examining circumstances in which entrusted, aggregated, or inferred digital information is used in ways that violate legitimate expectations of confidence and produce detriment to the individual.
Potential forms of detriment considered by the framework include behavioral manipulation, loss of autonomy, and unauthorized commercial exploitation via algorithmic training sets.
Algorithmic Asymmetry describes the structural imbalance that arises when a digital system or its operator possesses substantially greater capacity than an individual to aggregate information, infer characteristics, predict behavior, and use those insights to influence outcomes.
The individual may see only an interface, while the system observes patterns across extensive interactions and disparate datasets.
The Post-Entitlement Social Contract is the Forum's public-policy framework examining a transition from institutional models centered primarily on centralized service delivery toward models centered on foundational infrastructure and individual capability.
The concept proposes that public institutions should equip individuals with tools, open standards, and capability architectures that support greater self-direction in health, education, and financial management.
Within the Forum's work, Digital Public Infrastructure refers to foundational digital architectures capable of enabling individuals and institutions to interact, exchange information, establish credentials, access services, and conduct transactions.
The Forum's policy interest focuses specifically on DPI that is interoperable, privacy-preserving, transparent, and designed to increase citizen choice rather than expand surveillance or institutional dependency.
Intent is the authorized human purpose explaining why a digital system, policy, workflow, or automated process exists and establishing the teleological boundaries within which it must operate.
The Intent Layer (Layer 0) is the proposed architectural tier through which system purpose and operating boundaries are formally represented so downstream logic, models, and data executions remain verifiable and bound to that human purpose.
Goal Drift occurs when the actual behavior or optimization priorities of a system gradually diverge from its foundational human purpose.
This commonly results from metric hijacking under Goodhart's Law, iterative code deployments, personnel turnover, institutional incentives, or adaptive machine-learning routines operating without explicit intent anchors.
Agency-First describes an approach to institutional, technological, or commercial design in which increasing the meaningful capability and self-direction of individuals is treated as a primary design objective.
An Agency-First architecture asks not only "What can the system do for the user?", but fundamentally: "What does the system enable the user to understand, control, own, decide, and accomplish?"
Capability-Driven Monetization describes commercial models in which revenue is generated by providing demonstrable utility or increasing customer capability rather than maximizing attention capture or behavioral dependency.
The Forum and ICDBIA identify areas such as utility-based micro-transactions, open-protocol services, and transparent subscription architectures as alternatives to extractive advertising.
These definitions describe terminology used within the International Digitalization Forum's own policy and technical frameworks. Where a term also has an established meaning in law, technology, economics, or public policy, the Forum's use should not be interpreted as replacing that established meaning. Concepts developed by the Forum should be clearly distinguished from existing statutory law, formally adopted international treaties, or binding governmental policy unless and until such recognition exists.