  To address the need for regulating digital technologies without hampering
innovation or pre-digital transformation regulatory frameworks, we provide a
model to evolve Data governance toward Information governance and precise the
relation between these two terms. This model bridges digital and non-digital
information exchange. By considering the question of governed data usage
through the angle of the Principal-Agent problem, we build a distributed
governance model based on Autonomous Principals defined as entities capable of
choice, therefore capable of exercising a transactional sovereignty. Extending
the legal concept of the privacy sphere to a functional equivalent in the
digital space leads to the construction of a digital self to which rights and
accountability can be attached. Ecosystems, defined as communities of
autonomous principals bound by a legitimate authority, provide the basis of
interacting structures of increasing complexity endowed with a self-replicating
property that mirrors physical world governance systems. The model proposes a
governance concept for multi-stakeholder information systems operating across
jurisdictions. Using recent software engineering advances in decentralised
authentication and semantics, we provide a framework, Dynamic Data Economy to
deploy a distributed governance model embedding checks and balance between
human and technological governance. Domain specific governance models are left
for further publications. Similarly, the technical questions related to the
connection between a digital-self and its physical world controller (e.g
biometric binding) will be treated in upcoming publications.
