Introduction

Hey all,

Thanks for those who’ve joined already.

The Group
Firstly a few notes about the group: I’ll be setting up a Matrix service for chat shortly and the GitHub organization can be found at https://github.com/federated-commerce (please ping me to be added).

I’ll schedule some meetings focusing on a regular (UTC) time to make it easiest for everyone, but we’ll continue the conversation in chat and through GitHub issues so the meetings are non-essential (for those unable to attend).

I’ve taken the chair role for now but we’ll be better suited with 2-3 chairs for sustainability, so we’ll arrange a discussion for long-term chairs in a meeting soon.

Meetings will be scheduled in a git repository to enable everyone to contribute to the agenda and minutes.

And Me
I’ve been a technologist for over 20-years with the last 14-years increasingly focused on AI. I’ve been involved in many CGs at W3C including Web Payments, Machine Learning for the Web, and now I’m co-chair of SOLID.

I’ve also worked on .NET (for Microsoft), Java (for Sun Microsystems), and TensorFlow (for Google), and I’m now working on distributed zero-config and zero-UI software for personal data & communication, hence joining SOLID. 

However, the past 3-years I’ve been increasingly dealing with commerce and trading solutions on top of Linked Data / RDF so I’ve been building performant Swift and Rust-based wasm projects to handle highly-scalable distributed data systems suitable for machine learning.

And this is where this group comes in. 

And Finally
I’ve created and funded a non-profit cooperative to focus on these projects and will be aiming to create alternative reference implementations of many of the protocols underlying SOLID. I want to use this group to explore use cases and eventually solutions to commerce and trading challenges by discussing alternative projects, interests, and experiences. 

I envisage most of the standards to build an end-to-end commerce and trading solution already exist, but a reference architecture or workflow is missing and an accompanying API is needed, but before that I’d like to explore viability and set up a call to explore everyone else’s thoughts on web e-commerce and trading, and especially see if and where SOLID fits in.

Regards,

P.