No independent field evaluation of the decentralised stack for real UK communities

Claims about the usability of sovereignty-stack tools are almost entirely vendor-made. Honest status: Waku is pre-production (public testnet targeted 2026, mainnet 2027) and unproven for ordinary community use; Matrix works but faces metadata-leakage and homeserver-burden critiques; Solid stalled; PDS and mutual-credit pilots are rarely independently evaluated. No What Works-style body runs structured trials of these stacks with actual UK community organisations (housing co-ops, mutual aid groups, parish councils) and publishes comparable results, so funders and councils cannot distinguish production-ready from aspirational, and money chases whitepapers.

Misallocated trust cuts both ways: communities adopt immature tools and get burned, or dismiss mature ones as crypto-adjacent hype. Sixty years of What Works methodology exists; applying it here would discipline vendors (including the decentralised-web ecosystem itself) and de-risk adoption.

A funded 'civic stack test lab' running structured field trials of sovereignty-stack tools with UK community organisations, publishing comparable evaluations, reference architectures and total-cost-of-ownership data.

// Build now: First artefact: comparative field evaluation with a first community-organisation cohort; philanthropically fundable, trials generate the data.

Vendor claims dominate and no What Works-style body independently trials these tools with real communities, a proven methodology exists to apply, but no deadline forces it.