Methodology

A Data-Driven, Multi-Pillar Framework

The motivation for the 2025 European Digital Resilience Index (EDRIX) stems from the need to measure not just strategic intent, but tangible, real-world digital outcomes. True sovereignty is not merely a reflection of government policy, but the sum of a nation's entire capacity—from its developers and businesses to its public institutions and citizens—to create, deploy, and utilize technology independently. To capture this holistic view, the EDRIX integrates five distinct data pillars into a comprehensive composite framework.

We introduce two primary indices:

  1. The European Digital Resilience Index (EDRIX): A comprehensive score that measures a nation's overall digital strategic autonomy.
  2. The European Open Technology Readiness Index (EOTRIX): A more focused score that specifically measures a nation's adoption and readiness for open technologies, a key enabler of resilience.

The Five Pillars of the Index

Each pillar represents a critical dimension of digital resilience. By synthesizing these five pillars, the EDRIX moves beyond theory to provide a robust, evidence-based ranking of national digital performance.

  1. Public Policy: This pillar uses the 2024 Open Source Observatory (OSOR) report from the European Commission to grade the maturity of each member state's public sector Open Source strategies. It assesses the presence of legal frameworks, dedicated governance bodies (like OSPOs), and proactive initiatives, providing a measure of top-down strategic commitment. As the 2025 results show, some nations (e.g. Germany, Sweden, and France) have world-class policies on paper, but this does not always translate into leadership in other pillars, highlighting a potential gap between policy and real-world implementation (cf. for instance A Negative Assessment of German Digital Policy: Between Increased Dependence and Loss of Credibility, ESDP, 2025 and Politique numérique de l’État : le CNLL dénonce une stratégie d’exclusion des entreprises françaises du logiciel libre, CNLL, 2025).

  2. Developer Ecosystem: Digital resilience requires the capacity to build and maintain technology, not just consume it. This pillar measures the strength of a nation's domestic talent pool through two metrics:

    • The density of its developer community, using per-capita data on GitHub developers.
    • The number of vetted sovereign solutions in the EuroStack Directory Project. (Used in EDRIX only).

  3. Grassroots Adoption: This pillar measures the on-the-ground digital choices of citizens and businesses. It synthesizes market share data for open and sovereign technologies, including:

    • Linux Desktop Share: While relatively low overall (3.70% on average for the EU27, but growing steadily), it gives a very good proxy for Open Source adoption by individuals and business, and is relatively easy measure (cf. Statcounter and Cloudflare open dataset).
    • Sovereign Browser Share: The combined share of Open Source desktop browsers (currently, only Firefox, Brave have significant usage in Europe) and Opera, a European-led browser. This measures the public's (individual and businesses) preference for alternatives to dominant US-based browsers. (Used in EDRIX only). This is also relatively easy to measure (same sources as above).
    • Open Source Browser Share: The market share of Firefox and Brave alone. (Used in EOTRIX only).

  4. Private Sector Digital Resilience: This pillar provides a proxy for the digital sovereignty of a nation's private sector as a technology consumer. It is composed of:

    • A sovereignty rating (web, mail, DNS) of high-traffic domains with national TLDs, excluding obviously US-owned properties, assessing their reliance on non-EU technology providers.
    • The per-capita number of supporters for the EuroStack project, as reported by the EuroStack Industry Initiative.

  5. Public Sector Digital Resilience: This pillar measures the technological sovereignty of the state itself by rating the core digital infrastructure (web, mail, DNS) of its main public institutions, such as the head of state, government, and capital city.
    Of course. The new results paint a significantly different and more nuanced picture of European digital resilience. The previous narrative of a simple "Vanguards vs. Powerhouses" is no longer accurate. The updated analysis below reflects the new reality, using the precise figures you've provided to highlight the diverse and sometimes surprising strategies that define the top performers.

Detailed Index Calculation

To ensure fairness and clarity, both the EDRIX and EOTRIX are calculated using a structured, three-step methodology.

Step 1: Raw Pillar Score Aggregation

First, a "raw" score is calculated for each of the five pillars. For pillars composed of multiple metrics, a weighted average is computed to emphasize the importance of certain data points. For instance, within the Developer Ecosystem pillar, we give extra weight to the density of GitHub developers, because a strong, active talent pool is a more fundamental indicator of a nation's long-term capacity to innovate than the current number of catalogued solutions. Similarly, for the Private Sector Digital Resilience pillar, extra weight is given to the domain sovereignty ratings, as this reflects the tangible, real-world technology choices of businesses—a stronger measure of resilience than declared support for related initiatives. This step consolidates the underlying metrics into a single, meaningful value for each pillar before comparison between countries.

Step 2: Pillar Score Normalization

The raw pillar scores from Step 1 exist on different scales. To compare them fairly, each pillar's set of scores is normalized across all 27 member states to a common scale of 0 to 10.

In this min-max normalization, the country with the lowest raw score for a given pillar receives a normalized score of 0, and the country with the highest raw score receives a 10. All other countries are scored proportionally in between. This critical step ensures that each pillar has an equal potential impact on the final index, preventing any single pillar with a wider data range from disproportionately influencing the results.

Step 3: Final Index Composition

The final index is calculated as the simple average of the normalized pillar scores from Step 2.

  • The EDRIX is the average of its five normalized pillar scores (Public Policy, Developer Ecosystem, Grassroots Adoption, Private Sector Resilience, and Public Sector Resilience).
  • The EOTRIX is the average of its three specific normalized pillar scores (Public Policy, Developer Ecosystem, and Grassroots Adoption), using only the open-technology-focused metrics as described above.