Kicking off the Solid Community Group

Hi All

*Introduction*

I gave it a few days to allow time for people who wanted to join this
gropu.  Looking through the list of (41) it's nice to see a roughly even
mix of new faces and old.  Also, representatives of many of the firms
operating (or thinking of operating) in the solid space.

Welcome all!

*Personal Introduction* : My name is Melvin Carvalho, I've been a web
developer on Solid [1] for the many years.  My particular interest, is to
create a payment framework on top of the existing platform.

Solid does not have a mailing list, and it was felt that the w3c was a good
fit for such a thing, with its long track record of producing royalty free
specifications.


*Possible Areas of Collaboration*

Solid by it's modular nature, and due to bottom up design benefits from
standardization, common patterns and best practices.  As time goes on
documenting how people are using solid will enable new participants to
benefit from existing work.  I see four main areas

1. *Client Side*.  This includes work on solid libraries and user agents
(browsers).

An example would be how to handle cross origin http fetch requests in
modern browsers and servers.

2. *Server Side*.  This includes work on running a solid server, and also
helping server admins get started and maintain servers, deal with
logistical aspects, and share experiences.

An example would be how to set up a pod given a fresh machine, getting ssl
certificates, setting up a reverse proxy and adding terms and conditions.

3. *Applications**. *This includes writing solid apps, using frameworks,
best practices, app libraries and app stores*.  *Also, importantly creation
and maintenance of shared vocabularies.

An example would best practices for creating single page apps quickly using
modern frameworks (e.g. react, vue, angular)

4. *Protocols**. *This would be the specs currently used by the solid stack
[1].  We can document proposals [3].  Push them upstream to the solid
repositories.  Work on interoprability and perhaps try to create charters
and working groups in order to create w3c recommendations.

An example would be to create an efficient patch format to provide realtime
updates to agents watching a resource.

*What's Next?*

Please feel welcome to use this mailing list.  Community groups tend to be
quite broad and casual in nature, tho we should try and ensure that posts
are on the topic of solid.  If you have some ideas or apps best on solid,
or if you have a demo, a spec, or a design pattern, this is a place to
share.

Over the next few weeks the group can self organize and work out which work
items people would like to take on.

Not necessary, but some of the newer member might want to introduce
themselves (a sentence on who they are and one on why they are interested
in solid).

Look forward to working with you all!

Melvin

[1] https://solid.mit.edu/
[2] https://github.com/solid/solid-spec
[3] https://github.com/solid/solid/tree/master/proposals