About

What this is

An open-source draft EU Regulation intended to let citizens of the Union participate in the capital value created by hyper-automated production, prepared as the basis for a possible European Citizens' Initiative. The legal text, its memorandum, its objections and every review verdict live in a public repository; this site renders them.

Status update: 7 September 2026

This website presents the current Article 114 working draft with corrected explanations. A separate Article 352 alternative is being examined; it has not replaced this text. Publishing the draft does not mean its substantive review gates have passed.

The main open questions are the legal basis and compulsory equity mechanism, the evidence for the proposed 3% stake, enforcement, funding before the Reserve receives income, and correction of citizen payment records. The older memorandum's sizing figures have not been reproduced using the current designation criteria. They are not validated forecasts. The simulator is an illustrative model with stated limitations, not evidence that the proposal reaches its generational objective.

Recruitment and discussion can continue while these questions are addressed. The ECI Forum exchange is complete. The researcher was contacted on 2 September, and the ECI veteran replied on 5 September. A French letter to a Belgian MEP office was sent on 7 September 2026. There is no registered initiative and no collection of statements of support. The review ledger preserves the findings, including adverse results.

Not an EU document

This is a citizens' proposal. It is not published by, endorsed by, affiliated with or reviewed by the European Union, the European Commission, the European Parliament or any other Union institution, body, office or agency. It has no legal force. It is drafted in the conventions of Union legislation because a proposal meant to be assessed by those institutions should arrive in the form they read; the form is a courtesy to the reader, never a claim of authority. The site carries no EU emblem, and the seal it does carry belongs to this project alone.

Who

Initiated by David Vanheeswijck (Belgium). The drafting method uses adversarial AI review under the editor's responsibility; every verdict and disposition is on the ledger. An organisers' group of at least seven eligible EU citizens living in seven different Member States will be constituted if the project passes its own gates.

Who publishes this

Responsible for this site and for the draft it renders: David Vanheeswijck, Belgium. Write to hello@ownthemachine.eu. Everything substantive about the text belongs in the open, as an issue or pull request on the repository, where the answer can be read by everyone the draft concerns.

The same person is the controller for the little data this site occasions, described below.

Declared interest

The draft grew out of a book by its initiator. The campaign takes nothing from the book's sales and does not link to it, and every argument here can be checked without buying anything. That is not the whole of it. Attention paid to this campaign is attention that can reach the book, and the author is the same person, so the interest is real whether or not a link exists. It is declared here to be weighed, not because it has been designed away.

The gates

The campaign proceeds only through published gates with kill criteria: registrability soundings before constitution, constitution before filing, registration before collection. Independent, non-binding Forum advice arrived on 27 August 2026; an ECI veteran responded on 5 September. Neither response constitutes registration or institutional approval. Organiser recruitment continues. If a gate fails, this page will say so and the repository stays up as a public good.

Funding

No organisation, no bank account, no donations and no third-party money of any kind. Nobody has been paid, and nobody has worked on this for payment.

Saying "none" would be the easier answer and it would not be true. This site costs something to run and the initiator pays it personally: the domain, object storage and edge delivery at Scaleway in France, the API calls the review gates consume, and the Forward Email subscription on the initiator's personally paid Enhanced Protection account. No campaign-specific third-party funding or support is recorded as of 6 September 2026. Standard platform services on ordinary terms, including GitHub, Cloudflare, Forward Email and Google, are disclosed below.

Regulation (EU) 2019/788 obliges a registered initiative to name every source giving more than EUR 500 in a year and to keep that declaration current while signatures are collected. The obligation starts at registration. The declaration starts now, in campaign/FUNDING.md, which also carries the rules adopted in advance about what will never be accepted.

Your data

This site sets no cookies, runs no analytics scripts and loads nothing from third parties. There is no consent banner because there is nothing to consent to.

What is nonetheless processed, stated plainly rather than claimed away: any server that answers a request sees the address it came from, so the host keeps short-lived technical logs, including IP addresses, to deliver the pages and to defend against abuse. Those logs are not read for any other purpose, are not combined with anything, are not sold and are not shared. If you switch this site between paper and plate, that choice is written into your own browser's storage and never leaves it.

An email to hello@ownthemachine.eu is forwarded by Forward Email, a US provider, to the personal Gmail inboxes of two project contacts. The separate organisers@ownthemachine.eu address forwards to the initiator’s personal Gmail inbox. Your message is used to respond to your enquiry. Beyond this routing, we do not share or publish your enquiry without your agreement. Copies in these Gmail inboxes are separate from the private intake notes stored on the initiator’s local computer, outside the public repository. The 90-day review of inactive intake notes does not automatically delete email copies from Gmail. Contributor follow-up notes and their retention are described on Take part.

Anyone in the Union may ask what is held about them, and may complain to a supervisory authority; in Belgium that is the Data Protection Authority. When signing opens, it happens on the European Commission's own collection system under Regulation (EU) 2019/788, not here.

Where this site lives

The pages you are reading are stored in Scaleway Object Storage in the Paris region and served from Scaleway's own network. Scaleway is a French company; the files, the cache and the certificate are European.

Two parts of this website infrastructure are not, and a campaign about European ownership should say which: the domain's DNS is answered by Cloudflare, a United States company, though no page content passes through it, and the source repository is hosted on GitHub, also American. The one exception in the serving path is www.ownthemachine.eu, which is a redirect to this site and carries no content of its own.

Nothing here depends on any of that remaining true. The site is a static build of a public repository: it can be rebuilt and served from anywhere, by anyone, in minutes.

Where the review runs

The automated gate verdicts are produced by models; external human feedback is recorded separately. The compute that produced it has a jurisdiction of its own. Until 23 August 2026 the gates ran through OpenRouter, an American router. The pipeline uses Requesty's European endpoint. EU hosting, zero retention and no training use remain the default requirements. For the public or intended-for-publication, non-sensitive material Fable 5.1 reviews introduced on 6 September 2026, the editor may permit, explicitly for each run, the router-reported 30-day retention while retaining EU hosting and no training use. That exception excludes private correspondence, non-public personal data and sensitive unpublished material; public author attribution may appear.

The runner does not take that on trust. Before it spends a token it reads the router's own record of where the model runs and what becomes of the text, and refuses to start if the model is absent or fails the requirements selected for that run. Retention exceptions must be explicit; they do not change the default checks. Whatever it read is written into the review record, so each verdict carries the evidence rather than the assurance.

One distinction is worth keeping sharp, because it is the distinction this proposal is about. Hosted in Europe is not built in Europe. The models are American, running on European infrastructure under European rules, and of what this endpoint offers only Mistral is a European laboratory. A campaign about who owns the machine should say plainly that it does not yet run on one Europe owns.

Accessibility

Target: WCAG 2.1 AA, with the WCAG 2.2 focus-appearance and target-size criteria adopted early. The site is keyboard-complete and respects reduced-motion preferences. Found a barrier? Open an issue.