Village™
20 October 2026 · John Stroh, Director, My Digital Sovereignty Ltd
What it is
Village is a private, members-only online home for a group of people: a family, club, small business or committee. Members get a directory, discussion channels, events, polls, documents and video calls in one place, in English, te reo Māori, German, French or Dutch. The group's information is held in New Zealand or the EU, and each Village is separate from every other.
Who it is for
- Families and whānau who want one private place instead of scattered group chats. "We have everything in five different apps."
- Clubs, communities and member groups outgrowing a Facebook group or a shared inbox. "I don't know where our members' details actually are."
- Small businesses and operating organisations that want member communication, quotes and invoices under one roof. "We spend Sunday nights on paperwork."
- Committees and boards that need decisions written down properly. "Nobody can find what we agreed last year."
What a customer gets today
Live today: members-only platform, directory, channels, events, polls and voting, documents, video calls, the Village assistant, five interface languages, data-rights requests, where the member is emailed a link to the data-rights page and collects the file there as JSON (no real request has completed in production yet) (VIL-20, VIL-22); Village export of shared content (private and owner-only records are left out unless the exporter wrote them; fourteen record types), through the programming interface only, with no screen for it; a record type is refused whole if any record lacks a provenance hash (VIL-23); quoting and invoicing for businesses. VIL-20, VIL-22 and VIL-23 were established by an AI agent; no person has audited them (see the status page).
Available on request: Village Assembly (a structured group deliberation with a kept record) and Open Floor (members raise their own topics; opt-in per Village). Village Assembly and Open Floor are deployed and are set up by MDSL for a Village that opts in; there is no self-serve checkout, they are listed on the published pricing page, and no real sealed deliberation is on record yet.
Deliberation Village (and Consolidated Village Consensus): Deliberation Village is live, arranged per engagement with MDSL, and used with one Village so far; no real ratification is on record yet. Consolidated Village Consensus is deployed, priced per engagement and arranged with MDSL; at the 12 October count it was switched on for demonstration Villages only. Demonstration only: the Civic Assembly App, for which one demonstration round is set up; it is not on the price list and no price has been set.
Built: Village can read, check and file a Peppol-format (PINT A-NZ) e-invoice file that a signed-in Business user uploads (VIL-12). Peppol is the international network for sending invoices directly between accounting systems.
Not on offer: receiving invoices from the Peppol network and live sending; both depend on an approved Peppol access point.
Published pricing
Per Village per month, 200 members included, no per-seat fee. These are the figures on the published pricing page.
| Tier | Per month | Per year | Includes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Families | NZ$44 | NZ$422 | 10 GB, 500 video minutes/month |
| Communities & Clubs | NZ$79 | NZ$758 | 10 GB, 500 video minutes/month |
| Village Small Business | NZ$114 | NZ$1,094 | 50 GB, 2,000 video minutes/month |
Add-ons published on the same page: extra 25 GB storage NZ$26/month; 250 extra video minutes NZ$18/month; priority AI NZ$44/month; email NZ$35/month. A dedicated sovereign database (the Village's data in its own database on New Zealand infrastructure) is planned and depends on capacity; a request can be discussed; MDSL's pricing page lists it from NZ$175 a month, and MIO quotes no price of its own. Governance and regulated Villages are priced per engagement and are not on the price list. Iwi, hapū, marae, rūnanga and other Māori organisations are approached by MDSL directly, not through distributors; Village Kāhui Māori is by arrangement with MDSL and is outside any distributor's appointment.
How to introduce it
- "Where do your members' details and conversations live today, and who else can get at them?"
- "When your group makes a decision, how easily can you find what was agreed and who said what?"
- "Would it help if your members, your events and your invoices lived in one private place, with a flat price whatever the size up to 200?"
What to say and what not to say
A distributor works to the same wording. MDSL describes Village this way: it is members-only and private to each group; data is held in New Zealand or the EU; one flat price per Village; built in Aotearoa; available by paid subscription through checkout.
MDSL does not use these words about any product: tamper-proof, court-defensible, legally admissible, compliant, certified, "public". Direct messages are private in transit but not end-to-end encrypted, because the server can read their content, so they are never described as end-to-end encrypted; Peppol sending and governance-tier features are not promised. Village Assembly and Open Floor are described as available on request, opt-in per Village, and not self-serve. MDSL does not compare prices with other products and quotes no price that is not in the table above. Any absolute term needs approved wording from MDSL first.
What we provide you
The published pricing page and product pages. The share is one standard schedule, the same for every distributor, sent after the NDA.
Next step
The next step is for the distributor to say which of the four groups above they have in front of them. Access for that group is by paid subscription through checkout, and John Stroh confirms the tier and any governance arrangement. The subscription itself is between the customer and MDSL.
Nothing in this note is an offer, and no exclusivity, territory or margin is agreed or implied by it. Any arrangement today is with MDSL. If MIO is formed, it may later be assigned to MIO, and the terms would say so. Prices are those on the published pricing page; quote no other.