What value does the Seven-Layer Model provide to Governments and CIOs?

The model provides lawful digital services that are resilient and designed to survive vendor and funding cycles.

How do Donors and Multilaterals benefit from this model?

The model ensures country ownership, built-in safeguards, and measurable results for funded projects.

What is the value for Vendors and Architects?

The model provides a stable project scope and clear, testable acceptance criteria.

How does the model benefit Civil Society and Auditors?

It guarantees enforceable rights, transparency in digital processes, and effective paths to remedy.

How does the Seven-Layer Model apply to social protection transfers?

It ensures lawful payouts with traceable eligibility and a clear appeal path by structuring the legal basis, registries, eligibility logic, and grievance redress across its layers.

How does the model improve business licensing?

It produces enforceable permits and reduces dispute cycles by ensuring that automation rules are derived from published regulations and permits are issued by a signed, competent authority.

What is the model's application for civil registration?

It creates officially certified certificates that are recognized across different government services and national borders.

How does the model enable safe health data exchange?

It provides a framework for safe interoperability with auditable data use by establishing the lawful basis for custodianship, ensuring data provenance, and guaranteeing patient access and independent oversight.

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Seven Layer Model for Digital Public Infrastructure

A mandate-driven architecture with phased rollout, and enforceable outcomes.

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James Stewart, Public Digital

For DPI to fulfill its purpose it must be reliable over time, legible to all its users and stakeholders, and well governed. That means that even as we adopt iterative methods to design our services and infrastructure we mustn't lose sight of the vital role of legislative mandates and institutional clarity. Ott's framework helps us do just that, reminding us that even the design of seemingly simple modules can be a political act and offering a clear framework to work through the consequences

What is Digital Public Infrastructure?

Digital Public Infrastructure is a legal institution delivered through governed technology. The Seven Layer Model for Digital Public Infrastructure is a governance-first framework that sequences law, mandate, canonical records, orchestration, execution, interfaces, and oversight to make digital services legally enforceable. It is not the OSI networking model. The outcome is enforceable decisions, traceable accountability, and sustainable interoperability across sectors.

Valid public functions begin in law and remain under institutional custodianship. Systems do not gain legitimacy from performance or configuration; they acquire it through statutory origin, named responsibility, and contestability. Without this legal sequence, a platform can simulate service while failing to constitute governance.

Why this sequence matters

The Seven Layers

Establish the constitutional and statutory basis for digital functions and recognise digital legal effects.

Assign lawful custodianship and responsibility for service delivery and supervision.

Govern registries as evidence with provenance, stewardship, and correction procedures.

Operate certified environments that execute legally defined rules with traceability to institutional instructions.

Finalise public acts and issue binding decisions and certifications with legal effect.

Provide procedural access, receipts, timelines, and inclusive channels that operationalise rights.

Ensure enforceability, redress, and independent supervision over digital acts.

How does the Seven Layer Model make services legally enforceable?

By sequencing legal authority, institutional mandate, canonical records, governed rule execution, binding issuance, user rights at interfaces, and independent oversight.

Is this the OSI

networking model?

No. This framework governs lawful service delivery and due process; OSI standardises network communication and has no legal effect.

l7-oversight-remed

WHY IT IS NEEDED

Digital Public Infrastructure is often built as technology first, with governance and law considered later or not at all. This approach creates risks that weaken trust in institutions and limit the impact of digital public services. The Seven Layer Model was developed to address these gaps and to provide governments, donors, and implementers with a lawful and resilient foundation for digital transformation.

Why It Is Needed

Weak Institutional Mandates

If no public institution is clearly responsible for oversight and delivery, accountability breaks down and trust is eroded.

Records Without Recognition

Registries and data often lack evidentiary safeguards, leading to disputes over ownership, rights, and authenticity.

Unenforceable Outcomes

Services may issue outputs or approvals that lack legal standing, undermining citizen confidence in digital systems.

Lack of Oversight and Remedy

Without channels for appeals, audits, or scrutiny, mistakes and abuses remain uncorrected, weakening institutional legitimacy.

Unclear Legal Authority

When infrastructure is launched without legislation or regulation, its outputs can be challenged as unenforceable, leaving digital public services fragile.

Opaque Service Logic

Rules coded directly into platforms without legal grounding make decisions unappealable and difficult to scrutinise.

Interfaces Without Rights

Portals and apps often provide access but fail to embed procedural rights or obligations, leaving users without recourse.

MEET WITH AUTHOR

Senior advisor in Digital Identity and Digital Public Infrastructure. Ott helps institutions align mandates, canonical registers, machine-readable rules, and verifiable execution to deliver enforceable outcomes. Engagements combine policy, architecture, and delivery support.

"My mission in creating the Seven Layer Model is to give countries a practical and lawful path to digital transformation that strengthens trust in institutions."

Ott Sarv

Author of The Seven Layer Model

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Author

Conceptual illustration symbolising Digital Public Infrastructure and the Friday Test, showing consent, compliance, and institutional governance before digital services can act.

How The Seven Layer Model Exposes Gaps in GovStack Compliance

This post addresses the risks of adopting digital wallets and GovStack toolkits without domestic legal sequencing. It shows how withdrawal of consent is a legal act that must propagate across systems under statutory authority, not just toggle in software. The Seven Layer Model for Digital Public Infrastructure offers a repeatable sequence that ensures issuance, revocation, logging, and remedy are all institutionally owned and enforceable.

Ott Sarv

4 min read

Digital Public Infrastructure: The Law Before the Code

Digital Public Infrastructure begins in law, not configuration. A licensing scene shows how decisions move from statute and institutional mandate to canonical records, service logic, issuance, delivery, and remedy, and why donor acceleration without jurisdiction replaces capacity with simulation.

Ott Sarv

4 min read