RGESN 2024 parity

What this page is not

Sovrium does not claim RGESN conformity.

The Référentiel général d'écoconception de services numériques evaluates a digital service. A service built with Sovrium is the union of four things: the engine, your configuration, your content, and your hosting. Sovrium supplies one of the four.

So this page cannot tell you whether your service conforms. It tells you something narrower and more useful: for each of the 78 criteria, whether the answer is decided by Sovrium's code or by you, and where Sovrium's code decides it, what the code actually does.

Read it as an input to your own assessment, not as a substitute for one. A conformity declaration is yours to publish, about your service, and the référentiel is explicit that any public claim referring to it must meet the rules on environmental claims: reliability, transparency, verifiability.

The ownership model

A parity claim means nothing without saying who owns each row. This page applies one test to all 78 criteria:

If a criterion's outcome can change without any Sovrium code changing, it is not engine-owned.

That produces three ownership buckets:

Owner	Meaning
Engine	Sovrium's code decides the outcome. Every operator gets the same answer.
Operator	Your configuration, content, organisation or hosting decides it. Where Sovrium contributes something, the row says what.
Not applicable	The engine has no such phase or mechanism at all.

Status applies only to engine-owned rows, and has four values:

Status	Meaning
Met	Evidence in the code satisfies the criterion.
Partial	The engine does part of the work, or does the right thing without a stated policy behind it.
Not met	Verified absent. Something was looked for and is not there.
Not assessed	No evidence either way.

Not assessed is deliberately distinct from not met. A row nobody measured is not a row that failed, and recording it as a failure would be as misleading as recording it as a pass. Exactly one criterion carries it, and the row says what was not measured.

Headline numbers

Of the 78 criteria:

Bucket	Count
Engine-owned	49
Operator-owned	22
Not applicable	7

Of the 49 engine-owned criteria:

Status	Count
Met	15
Partial	25
Not met	8
Not assessed	1

There is no single fraction here, and any page that gives you one is hiding something. "15 out of 78" would be wrong twice: the denominator that matters is 49, and 22 criteria are not Sovrium's to answer on your behalf.

Criteria by family

Requirements below are paraphrased in English. The référentiel carries its own licence, so nothing is quoted verbatim; each criterion id is cited so you can map back to the official text at ecoresponsable.numerique.gouv.fr.

1. Stratégie

Criterion	What it asks	Owner	Status	How Sovrium addresses it
1.1	Service assessed favourably for usefulness, accounting for environmental impacts	Operator		A per-service assessment. Sovrium contributes nothing.
1.2	Defined user targets, business needs and real expectations	Operator		Per-service.
1.3	At least one identified ecodesign referent	Operator		An organisational role.
1.4	Periodic reviews confirming the ecodesign approach holds	Operator		Sovrium publishes this review. It is the first, and no recurring cadence stands behind it yet.
1.5	Objectives set for reducing its own environmental impacts	Operator		Sovrium states a posture in its architecture decisions, but sets no quantified reduction target.
1.6	Data collected responsibly and sparingly	Engine	Partial	Built-in analytics are first-party and cookie-free, honour Do Not Track, hash visitors, and purge after 365 days. Working against it: binary installs check GitHub for a newer release on startup, which you turn off with SOVRIUM_DISABLE_NETWORK=1.
1.7	Encryption level adapted to needs	Engine	Partial	OAuth tokens are encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM. That is the whole scope: table data, attachments and bucket storage are not application-encrypted. Transport security is your deployment's.
1.8	Open-source efforts	Engine	Partial	The source is public under BSL 1.1, which converts to Apache 2.0 on 2030-08-11. BSL is source-available rather than open source, and the licence says so itself. The types package is MIT.
1.9	Built on standard interoperable technologies rather than proprietary closed ones	Engine	Met	Configuration is JSON, YAML or TypeScript. sovrium schema emits a JSON Schema. The API is described by an OpenAPI 3.1 document. Storage is SQLite or PostgreSQL.
1.10	Relies on documented open APIs to interact with hardware	Not applicable		The engine interfaces with no hardware.

2. Spécifications

Criterion	What it asks	Owner	Status	How Sovrium addresses it
2.1	Defined list of hardware profiles users will access it from	Operator		Per-service.
2.2	Usable on older device models	Engine	Partial	Pages are server-rendered, so static content displays without JavaScript. No device baseline is stated.
2.3	Usable over low bandwidth or offline	Engine	Partial	Low-data mode honours the Save-Data header and the reduced-data client hint, and a page cache serves repeat requests. There is no offline support and no service worker.
2.4	Usable on older operating-system and browser versions	Engine	Not assessed	The build targets current JavaScript with no downlevelling, and no minimum browser version is published. Nothing was measured against an old browser, so this is recorded as unknown rather than failed.
2.5	Adapts to different display terminal types	Engine	Met	Every component takes responsive overrides at three breakpoints, and the theme's breakpoints are yours to change.
2.6	Design and code review carrying environmental-impact objectives	Engine	Partial	The lint configuration includes ecodesign rules, but they are advisory rather than blocking. What does block the build is a byte budget on the eagerly loaded client bundle.
2.7	Maintenance and decommissioning strategy	Engine	Partial	Records export to CSV and JSON, the configuration is one portable file, and the default database is a single SQLite file. There is no one-command full-instance export and no documented decommissioning procedure.
2.8	Suppliers required to guarantee an impact-reduction approach	Operator		A procurement act.
2.9	Environmental impacts of ready-made interface components considered	Engine	Partial	Headless primitives are used only where no native HTML element exists, and the platform ships exactly two self-hosted fonts. A third typeface was deliberately removed. These are weight decisions, not a formal assessment.
2.10	Environmental impacts of third-party services considered at selection	Engine	Partial	AI calls prefer a local provider, analytics are first-party, and no CDN sits on the engine's asset path. The reasoning on record is sovereignty rather than impact.

3. Architecture

Criterion	What it asks	Owner	Status	How Sovrium addresses it
3.1	Architecture and components designed to reduce their own impacts	Engine	Met	One standalone binary with no Node runtime. SQLite and local file storage are the zero-config defaults, so a minimal install needs no managed service. Pages are server-rendered and only the interactive parts ship JavaScript.
3.2	Architecture able to adapt resource use to actual consumption	Engine	Not met	No autoscaling and no scale-to-zero. Every deployment manifest pins a single instance.
3.3	Able to support the technical evolution of protocols	Engine	Partial	Built on web-standard request and response objects, with a versioned migration chain across two database dialects. No protocol-evolution policy is stated.
3.4	Corrective updates guaranteed for the software's planned lifetime	Engine	Partial	Semantic versioning and a release pipeline, plus a licence change date that caps the long-term risk. No support window is declared.
3.5	Corrective updates installable independently of feature updates	Engine	Partial	Semantic versioning separates patch from minor, and sovrium update installs in place. There is no maintenance branch, so a patch release carries whatever else landed on the trunk.
3.6	Incremental updates, rather than replacing the whole codebase each time	Engine	Not met	Distribution is a standalone binary, and every update replaces it in full. The container path replaces the whole image.
3.7	Development and test environments used in proportion to need	Engine	Met	The quality pipeline analyses which files changed and runs only the related end-to-end tests, skipping them entirely for documentation-only changes. Continuous integration runs on a machine that powers down when idle.

4. Expérience et interface utilisateur

Criterion	What it asks	Owner	Status	How Sovrium addresses it
4.1	Animations, videos and sounds only with autoplay disabled	Engine	Met	The video and audio components have no autoplay option at all. The one animated component ships a pause control and respects the reduced-motion preference.
4.2	Content displayed without infinite scroll	Engine	Partial	Pagination is the default at 25 rows. Infinite scroll exists as an explicit opt-in you have to choose.
4.3	Navigation path optimised for each main feature	Operator		Your information architecture.
4.4	User decides whether a third-party service is activated	Engine	Partial	The engine activates no third-party service by default. If you configure Google Fonts, the pages request them with no user-facing consent gate.
4.5	Majority use of native operating-system, browser or language components	Engine	Met	Forms render native input, select, textarea and file controls. Headless primitives appear only for dialogs, menus and tooltips, where no native element exists.
4.6	Video, audio and animated content only where it carries information	Operator		Your content. The design rules forbid decorative ornament.
4.7	Soberest choice among text, image, audio and video	Operator		Your content. The design rules exclude illustration and stock photography.
4.8	Limits the number of downloaded fonts	Engine	Met	Exactly two self-hosted variable fonts, locked by a test so a third cannot be added quietly. The binary fallback path uses the system stack and downloads none.
4.9	Limits server requests during user input	Engine	Partial	Forms validate in the browser before any request, and multi-step forms validate each step before advancing.
4.10	Informs the user of the expected input format	Engine	Partial	Fields carry required, a placeholder and a native input type. There is no dedicated help or hint field, so format guidance has nowhere to live beyond the placeholder.
4.11	Informs the user, before transfer, of expected file weights and formats	Engine	Partial	Accepted formats are declared before selection. The size limit is not: it surfaces only after the user picks a file that is too large.
4.12	Tells the user when a feature has significant environmental impacts	Engine	Not met	No such affordance exists.
4.13	Limits notifications while letting the user disable them	Engine	Partial	Email only, with no push notifications. There is no per-user notification preference and no unsubscribe mechanism.
4.14	Avoids manipulative interface patterns	Engine	Met	No countdown, urgency, scarcity or confirm-shaming component exists. The design decision that governs the interface requires every element to do comprehension, next-action, permission or admission work, which excludes manipulative chrome by construction.
4.15	Gives the user a means of monitoring and reducing associated impacts	Engine	Partial	Low-data mode shows a footer badge with a one-click return to the full version, and every response carries an X-Eco-Index grade. The Footprint console is for operators, not end users, so it does not answer this criterion.

5. Contenus

Criterion	What it asks	Owner	Status	How Sovrium addresses it
5.1	File format adapted to content and viewing context, per image	Engine	Partial	Image delivery negotiates WebP from the browser's Accept header, and otherwise serves the stored file unchanged. Automation conversions default to WebP; a plain automation resize keeps the source format. AVIF is offered by neither path — the runtime carries no AV1 encoder on Linux.
5.2	Images compressed to a level adapted to content and context	Engine	Partial	A default quality applies, and a per-request quality parameter is available. Adaptation is never automatic.
5.3	Video definition adapted to content and viewing context	Operator		The engine has no video transcoding.
5.4	Efficient, context-adapted video compression	Operator		As above.
5.5	A listen-only mode for videos	Operator		The engine renders a video element or a provider embed and offers no audio-only mode.
5.6	Audio compression adapted to content and listening context	Operator		No audio pipeline.
5.7	File format adapted to content and use, per document	Operator		Your documents.
5.8	Archival and deletion strategy for obsolete content	Engine	Partial	Real purges exist: analytics after 365 days, account erasure on an hourly job, a conversation-memory sweep and a temporary-file sweep. Working against it, deleted records are kept indefinitely by design, and there is no per-table retention policy you can declare.

6. Frontend

Criterion	What it asks	Owner	Status	How Sovrium addresses it
6.1	A maximum weight and request limit per screen	Engine	Partial	A build-time byte budget caps the eagerly loaded client bundle, and X-Eco-Index grades each response by size. Neither is a per-screen budget, and no request-count limit exists.
6.2	Caching for the whole of the transferred content it controls	Engine	Met	Content-hashed assets are cached for a year as immutable, other assets for an hour in production, and rendered pages for five minutes.
6.3	Compression for the transferred resources it controls	Engine	Not met	Sovrium applies no gzip or brotli compression. If your reverse proxy compresses responses you get it at that layer, but the engine does not do it.
6.4	Images displayed at dimensions matching the display context	Engine	Not met	No responsive image generation. Resizing happens only when you pass explicit width or height parameters.
6.5	Avoids loading unused resources and content	Engine	Partial	Most interactive components load on demand rather than up front, and low-data mode replaces heavy ones with lighter fallbacks. Working against it, images rendered by the engine do not carry the browser's lazy-loading attribute.
6.6	Restricts device-sensor use to the service's need	Engine	Met	The engine requests no device sensors of any kind.
6.7	Hosts all the static resources it emits on a single domain	Engine	Met	Stylesheets, client bundles and the analytics script are all served from your own origin. The only external requests come from Google Fonts, and only if you configure them.

7. Backend

Criterion	What it asks	Owner	Status	How Sovrium addresses it
7.1	A server-side cache for the most-used data	Engine	Met	Rendered pages are cached in memory under a byte budget you set with ECO_PAGE_CACHE_MAX_MB, with oldest-first eviction and checksum-based invalidation. Compiled stylesheets and image transforms are cached too.
7.2	Retention durations on data and documents	Engine	Partial	Analytics purge at 365 days, account erasure hard-deletes on an hourly job, and conversation memory and temporary files are swept. There is no general per-table retention policy, and deleted records are kept indefinitely.
7.3	Informs the user of a background process in progress	Engine	Met	Records whose AI fields are still computing show a refining state, and automation runs report queued, running and terminal status.
7.4	Relies on a consensus mechanism that minimises resource use	Not applicable		No blockchain, no consensus mechanism.

8. Hébergement

Seven of these ten criteria are decided entirely by your hosting provider. Sovrium can be honest about that or pad the count; it does the former.

Criterion	What it asks	Owner	Status	How Sovrium addresses it
8.1	Hosting with a footprint-reduction approach	Operator		Sovrium lowers what you need to host: SQLite and local storage by default mean no managed database, the container runs as a non-root user, and bare-metal deployment is documented.
8.2	Hosting with a sustainable equipment-management policy	Operator		Provider policy.
8.3	Hosting with a minimised PUE	Operator		Provider metric.
8.4	Hosting with a minimised WUE	Operator		Provider metric.
8.5	Hosting on documented, majority-renewable electricity	Operator		Provider disclosure.
8.6	Hosting located coherently with its activities, minimising footprint	Operator		Sovrium offers no help here. None of the shipped deployment manifests exposes a region setting, so region choice is entirely yours to make in your provider's console.
8.7	Hosting that treats server heat efficiently	Operator		Provider facility.
8.8	Hot and cold data hosted distinctly	Engine	Not met	No storage tiering exists.
8.9	Data duplicated only where necessary	Engine	Met	No read replicas. Materialised views are an explicit opt-in you declare per view. Everything else that duplicates data is a cache under a byte budget.
8.10	External constraints accounted for in asynchronous computation and transfers	Engine	Not met	Nothing schedules work by grid carbon intensity or time of day. Deferral exists for latency reasons only.

9. Algorithmie

Sovrium never trains or fine-tunes a model. It calls inference and embedding endpoints and nothing else. Five of these seven criteria are about the training phase, so they do not apply, and 9.1 is answered by construction.

Criterion	What it asks	Owner	Status	How Sovrium addresses it
9.1	Whether the necessity of a training phase was questioned	Engine	Met	Answered by construction. There is no training phase.
9.2	Learning phase with minimised, proportionate complexity	Not applicable		No learning phase.
9.3	Mechanisms limiting the quantity of training required	Not applicable		No training.
9.4	Training data limited to the strict necessity	Not applicable		No training.
9.5	Model update and retraining frequency optimised	Not applicable		No retraining.
9.6	Compression techniques for trained models	Not applicable		No models are trained or hosted.
9.7	An inference strategy optimised for resource consumption	Engine	Not met	Two levers work in your favour: AI calls prefer a reachable local provider, and each AI field takes its own model, temperature and token ceiling. Working against them, the token ceiling has no default, and on PostgreSQL an app with retrieval agents rebuilds its entire embedding corpus at every server start.

What the operator still has to do

Twenty-two criteria are yours. This is the section worth reading before you commit to an assessment, because these are the ones no engine can close for you.

Your organisation and process (1.1 to 1.5, 2.1, 2.8). Assessing the service's usefulness against its impacts, defining your users and their real needs, naming an ecodesign referent, running periodic reviews, setting your own reduction objectives, listing the hardware profiles you support, and holding suppliers to an impact-reduction commitment. Sovrium contributes this page and its architecture decisions. Everything else is organisational.

Your content (4.6, 4.7, 5.3 to 5.7). Whether your videos, audio and animations carry information rather than decoration, whether you chose the soberest medium for each need, and whether your videos, audio files and documents use appropriate definitions, compression and formats. Sovrium stores and serves what you give it. It transcodes images and nothing else, so every video and audio decision is yours.

Your navigation (4.3). Optimising the path to each main feature is a design act on your configuration.

Your hosting (8.1 to 8.7). Seven criteria covering your provider's footprint approach, equipment policy, PUE, WUE, electricity origin, data-centre location and heat reuse. Sovrium reduces what you need, but chooses nothing.

Where Sovrium helps, concretely. ECO_LOW_DATA_DEFAULT gives you a low-bandwidth posture without touching your configuration. SQLite and local storage defaults let a small service run on one small machine. The ecodesign lint rules and the client-bundle byte budget travel with the codebase if you fork it. The full lever list is in the Ecoconception reference.

Where it does not. Region choice is the clearest gap: none of the deployment manifests exposes one, so you set it in your provider's console and record it yourself.

How to verify these claims on your own instance

Nothing on this page asks you to take it on trust.

Measured figures. Sign in as an administrator and open /_admin/footprint. It reports what your instance actually consumed: response grades and the mean response size, page-cache hit rate and occupancy against its budget, process CPU time and memory, and per-table and per-bucket storage with the measurement source named on every row. Figures that were not measured read as unavailable rather than as zero.

Declared levers. The same page lists every ECO_* variable with its effective value and where that value came from. Configuration is declared, not measured: it describes how your instance is set up, not what it emitted. The reference for each lever is the Ecoconception page.

Response grades. With ECO_INDEX_HEADER=on, every response carries an X-Eco-Index header graded A to G from its transferred size. Check it with curl -sI https://your-instance/ | grep -i x-eco-index. Read it for what it measures, which is bytes. It is not a Lighthouse score and not an EcoIndex.fr score, and the grading thresholds are Sovrium's own.

The claims about absent features. The source is public. Every "not met" on this page is a claim that something is absent, and absence is the easiest thing to check: search the repository.

Version and method

A parity claim without a version pair is not checkable, so both are stated here.

Référentiel	RGESN version 2024 (« version 2 »), Arcep and Arcom with ADEME, DINUM, CNIL and INRIA. Published 17 May 2024, document last updated 28 May 2024. 78 criteria across 9 families.
Sovrium version audited	0.22.2, plus the Footprint console work that follows it.
Audit date	2026-08-13
Method	Code inspection of the engine, its lint and build configuration, its tests and its deployment manifests, in nine sweeps mapped to the nine families. Every row rests on something read in the code, or is marked not assessed.

This page goes stale. Any change to the engine's footprint posture can invalidate a row, and a stale compliance claim is worse than none. The version pair above is what lets you see that: if the Sovrium version you run is well ahead of the one audited, treat the rows as indicative and re-check the ones you depend on.

Related pages

• Ecoconception. The ECO_* lever reference and the measurement contract.
• GDPR and privacy. Data minimisation, export and erasure.
• Analytics. Cookie-free, first-party, with bounded retention.
• Environment variables. The full variable reference.