[wbs] response to 'Call for Review: Solid Working Group Charter'

The following answers have been successfully submitted to 'Call for Review:
Solid Working Group Charter' (Advisory Committee) for Ponder Source by
Michiel de Jong.


The reviewer's organization does not support this Charter for the reasons
cited in comments but is not raising a Formal Objection.

Additional comments about the proposal:
   Comment 1: co-chairs
--------------------
Over the past few years, the Solid project has grown to include many
competing implementers, both open source and closed source, and
multi-million dollar stakes. So we have an amazing opportunity here.

At the same time, standards are like sausages: you don't want to know the
details of how they are made. At several key moments along the journey,
Sarven Capadisli was there to help us find consensus and move on to the
next step. Most notably, he was instrumental in getting our two competing
test suite efforts back together. He also provided significant improvements
to the proposed WG charter, to prevent a rift between the proposed WG
effort and the existing CG work.

In the interest of (1) guarding the W3C process, (2) bringing the Solid
project to its full potential, and (3) the business interests of the many
Solid project participants, including my own employer, the Ponder Source
Foundation, I think creating this WG without someone like Sarven as a
co-chair would be a mistake.

He was also a key contributor to most of the existing documents including
Solid Protocol and Solid QA, and knows the years of thought that have gone
into these documents so far like few others. I therefore second the request
already made by several other reviewers, to invite Sarven as a 3rd
co-chair.

At the same time, I value the expertise and dedication that Laurens
Debackere and Aaron Coburn will bring as co-chairs of our WG, and together
with Sarven I think they can provide a healthy mix of industry use cases
(e.g. build things that work in practice), implementer's interests (e.g.
avoid purist rabbit hole discussions), and a fair, open and constructive
process (e.g. a transparent link between specs, tests, and implementation
reports).

Comment 2: WG name
------------------
On a separate note, IMHO, the title of the working group should describe
the problem we aim to solve, not any particular solution we expect to
arrive at. I therefore suggest changing it to "Personal Data Store WG" or
something similar. In line with this, its mission statement "to standardize
the Solid Protocol" sound a bit too preconceived, something more open
minded like "to produce the best web standards for Personal Data Stores"
might be better. Our mission is not to use a particular technology, our
mission is to achieve that technology's benefits.



The reviewer's organization intends to participate in these groups:
   - Solid Working Group

The reviewer's organization:
   - intends to review drafts as they are published and send comments.
   - intends to develop experimental implementations and send experience
reports.
   - intends to develop products based on this work.
   - intends to apply this technology in our operations.


Comments about the deliverables:
   We (Ponder Source) will be collaborating with several other stakeholders
on enterprise-grade open source software components, implementing the
specification on the server-side, at the infrastructure level, and relying
on spec-compliant Solid server implementations on the client-side.

We also expect to take an active role in test suite work, and in the
development of the various specification documents, in particular probably
the Solid Application Interoperability spec, which will hopefully mature
rapidly enough (incubating in the CG) to pick this up in the WG at some
point during 2024.


Answers to this questionnaire can be set and changed at
https://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/33280/solid-wg-2023/ until 2023-10-06.

 Regards,

 The Automatic WBS Mailer

Received on Wednesday, 4 October 2023 14:03:04 UTC