Before a new type of aeroplane may carry passengers, its maker has to show that everyone can get out within a minute and a half. In the dark, and with half of the emergency exits closed. Airbus did it in 2006 with the A380: 873 people in 78 seconds.
Nobody asks that of our IT.
Yet almost everything we do runs on a handful of American platforms. For four weeks I wrote about the emergency exit, the seatbelts, the life jacket and the next aeroplane. Time to practise.
So I did the drill myself. My EU score: 34. Login and AI are in the red.
That is no real surprise if you have read this series. I log in with my Google account to dozens, maybe hundreds of services. And I still write this article together with Claude. The two seatbelts I wrote about are exactly the ones fastened tightest on me.
You do not practise an evacuation to leave tomorrow. You practise so you know what to do when you have to. Where are your files? Who manages your login? Which integrations fall over? And which AI do you actually lean on?
That is why there is now the Soevereiniteitsscan, our sovereignty scan: scan.newground.nl. In ten minutes you see where your sovereignty stands, with a European alternative and advice for each part. Just enough to put straight in front of your partners, your board, your investors or your CTO.
What you fill in stays with you.
Nothing goes to a server, and nothing goes to an AI model. Your score comes from fixed calculation rules. AI only helps behind the scenes to keep the list of alternatives up to date; a person decides what goes on it.
It is an indication, not an audit. But it is an honest start: you know where the exits are.
This is the last part of the series. In part 1 I wrote that the emergency exit does open and the slide does inflate, but that we are still at eleven kilometres altitude. That still holds. The difference: now you know how far it is to the nearest exit.
Do the scan and share your EU score in the comments. I am curious where we all stand.
P.S. For a few weeks now I have been active on LinkedIn again, and this series was an experiment too: an article every week, with my own images, on LinkedIn and here on the site. Sharing and experimenting turns out to be fun, so I am carrying on.
Next week: action in the taxi. Less talk, more elbow grease.
