SINE Strategy Wiki

SINE Foundation

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A think-and-do-tank founded by academic experts and progressive entrepreneurs. Designs and implements “the foundation for lasting data collaboration” — delivered as ready-to-use governance tools and open-source software. Neutral non-profit; supports global organizations to identify, initiate and maintain data-collaboration use cases in complex multi-stakeholder environments.

Originated the Data Commons framework, published April 2022 together with Deutsche Bank, Systemiq and TLGG (sine-data-commons-2022).

Known involvement

  • Originator and lead author of the Data Commons framework (2022), co-published with Deutsche Bank, Systemiq, and TLGG Consulting.

  • PACT’s named “technology partner” ⟨2026-10-29⟩ — the formal designation, from PACT’s own Pathfinder Network Vision Paper (June 2022): “PACT is hosted by WBCSD and supported by its knowledge partner, McKinsey Sustainability, as well as its technology partner, SINE Foundation.” McKinsey Sustainability holds the parallel knowledge partner title. The Vision Paper also carries SINE’s own 2022 self-description verbatim (“a tech for good organization founded by progressive entrepreneurs, academic experts, and software engineers”). Until this ingest the wiki had only its own paraphrase, “co-built with”. The Network is also the flagship use case validating the Data Commons values in practice. ⟨Uncomfortable corollary, see open task 19: the document SINE was technology partner on states the confidentiality requirement precisely — “protects organizations from any possible back-tracing of product-specific information” — and answers it with governance, legal frameworks and data minimisation. Cryptography appears nowhere in it, eighteen months after SINE’s own first project shipped a secure-MPC carbon benchmarking tool.⟩ ⟨2026-11-01, confirmed and extended from Pathfinder Framework v2 (Jan 2023): the title is stable across the document and across versions — the Foreword (Dominic Waughray, EVP WBCSD) thanks “McKinsey & Company, our knowledge partner, and SINE, our tech collaborator”; the page-2 collaborator spread labels SINE “Technology partner”; the back matter repeats the Vision Paper’s sentence verbatim. One asymmetry: the Disclaimer credits only McKinsey (“provided analytical insights and support”) and does not name SINE — consistent with a division where McKinsey holds the analytical authorship and SINE the technology track. The confidentiality gap is sharper in v2 than in the Vision Paper: zero cryptographic vocabulary in 78 pages.⟩

  • SINE’s own self-description, January 2023 ⟨2026-11-01⟩ — the “About SINE Foundation” box in Framework v2, i.e. SINE’s wording published under WBCSD’s imprint:

    SINE designs and implements the foundation for lasting data collaboration—delivered as ready-to-use governance tools and open-source software. The nonprofit foundation supports global organizations to identify, initiate, and maintain use cases for data collaboration within complex multistakeholder environments.

    The 2022 Vision Paper’s version of the box is identical in its opening sentence (“a tech for good organization founded by progressive entrepreneurs, academic experts, and software engineers”); the offer is governance tools and open-source software, not privacy-enhancing technology. ⟨Inference: load-bearing for open task 19. SINE was not claiming a PET capability in the PACT period and then failing to deliver it — it was describing a governance-and-software offer, and the cryptographic work (Cozero 2021, CCTI 2026) sits either side of that period. The honest framing of the PACT years is sequencing, not shortfall.⟩

  • Co-host of the Jan 24, 2023 workshop (with Einstein Center Digital Future and Systemiq) that produced the Data Commons whitepaper.

  • From July 2026: sub-contractor and co-PI in the CCTI project — cryptographic trust infrastructure for AI agents, funded by ARIA (UK) with the University of Cambridge. SINE leads WP-C (EIC + credible matching) and WP-E (institutional lens), co-leads evaluation (AI Advantage) and facilitation. Contributed expertise per the agreement: cryptography, game theory, and industrial supply chains.

Chronology (per Tell Münzing’s LinkedIn profile, 2026-08-14)

  • October 2020 — SINE Foundation founded; Tell Münzing co-founder, seated in Bolzano.
  • March 2021 — first project: “the first carbon benchmarking tool using secure Multi-Party Computing”, with Cozero (cozero.io).
  • April 2022 — Data Commons for Sustainability whitepaper.
  • 2023 — established the PACT framework for Product Carbon Footprints for the WBCSD. ⟨Note: read as the date of SINE’s own contribution, not of PACT’s founding — PACT itself launched in 2020 and went public at COP26 in 2021, per PACT Methodology v3.0. The wording here is the LinkedIn profile’s, kept verbatim.⟩
  • 2025 — established iLEAP with the Smart Freight Centre: logistics emissions from primary activity data, toward an “Internet of Emissions Data” open to everyone. ⟨The founding, partnership and adoption claims still rest only on this LinkedIn profile plus the “15+ companies” mention in the Hypothesenpapier; a Smart Freight Centre primary source is still needed. The standard itself is now documented from a primary source — see iLEAP Technical Specifications (2026), ingested 2026-10-01. Note that the conformance gate (act.sine.dev) and the reference API (api.ileap.sine.dev) run on SINE domains.⟩

Self-framing he uses for SINE: Digital Public Goods, Collective Action Problems, digital sovereignty, “cutting-edge research results in cryptography and economics”.

People

  • Aurel Stenzel — co-author of both the 2022 Data Commons whitepaper and the 2023 DPP whitepaper on SINE’s side. Contact: aurel@sine.foundation.
  • Tell Münzing — co-founder (10/2020) and co-author of the 2022 Data Commons whitepaper; in parallel Director Transformation & Sustainability at Performance Consultants International (the GROW/Whitmore firm) and Founder & CEO of 1Transformation; the principal behind the coaching stack.

Sources

  • CCTI — sources/proposals/2026-06-17-aria-ccti-proposal-draft-2.md (ARIA agreement Schedule 3, draft)
  • Pathfinder Network Vision Paper (2022) — sources/standards/2026-10-29-pact-network-vision-paper/2026-10-29-pact-network-vision-paper.md (technology-partner designation, SINE boilerplate)
  • sine-data-commons-2022 — sources/whitepapers/2022-04-25-data-commons-final.pdf
  • sine-dpp-data-commons-2023 — sources/whitepapers/2023-04-12-sine-whitepaper-final.pdf
  • Tell Münzing — sources/people/2026-08-14-linkedin-tell-muenzing.pdf (chronology, self-framing)
  • PACT, Jan 2023) — sources/standards/2026-10-29-pact-methodology-v2-framework-2023/…md (Foreword, page-2 collaborator spread, Disclaimer, “About SINE Foundation”)

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