Re: Kicking off the Solid Community Group

Hello all,

I am Mischa Tuffield, I am been been looking for a problem to tackle with decentralised technologies for a while. I am an ex-academic, startup person, and have been lucky enough to interact with/collaborative with some of the nicest people on the web.

This is the first time in a while I have signed-up to anything vaguely W3C-like as I am super keen to follow the solid project … by mainly lurking I guess. I used to be pretty involved in the Semantic Web community, I participated on the RDF 2.0 working group, I sat next to the guy to led the Sparql Update work for around 7 years and was pretty involved in the Social Web XG (which is what I believe was the foundation for what ended up becoming what is now known as "Community Groups” at the W3C), I edited the final report of that activity along with Harry Halpin, it was a fantastic project and loads of fun.

Now I am attempting to build a decentralised banking experience on top of Ethereum, we are making great progress here in London. I am rabbit-holing when it comes to the global distributed computer that is Ethereum / EVM. Happy to discuss this stuff over a beer or something.

I can’t wait to find out more about solid and the work you guys have been doing!

Mischa *will mainly be lurking …
> On 13 Oct 2018, at 22:03, Knut-Olav Hoven <knutolav@gmail.com> wrote
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> my name is Knut-Olav Hoven, am 34 years old and live in Drammen,
> Norway. I am working for the Norwegian tax administration as a
> software developer, primarily in Java.
> 
> I have for many years been fascinated with the semantic web techniques
> and possibilities, and had a great experience from a project at the
> Norwegian broadcasting corporation a few years ago, where we utilized
> distributed versioned RDF documents with event sourcing techniques to
> create a radio archives solution. As part of this project I did a lot
> of research on different kinds of identification systems, and the
> results are published in this article
> <https://nrkbeta.no/2018/01/24/how-we-talk-about-things-in-systems/>.
> 
> The semantic web brings great flexibility, and together with identity,
> privacy, distribution and cryptography, I see no limits to the
> possibilities this can give us.
> 
> As a side note: playing with my new Solid Pod this week brings back a
> lot of memories to the early days of the web of hand-coded web pages,
> small buttons, unclear behavior, and a lot of fun playing around with
> new technology, while hoping not to break too much.
> 
> As the community grows, and more developers come to explore these
> technologies, they will look for directions and examples, request
> extensions and propose changes.
> 
> Sadly, most developers don't read specs, they copy examples. I still
> see people argue over which HTTP verb to use, or on what makes a
> "restful" URL. A good and precise specification is always a nice way
> to end a bad discussion. We need good examples of use, and together
> find the best solutions for enhancements, still with our minds focused
> on the future of the web.
> 
> Hope I can be of help.
> 
> Best regards,
> Knut-Olav Hoven
> On Fri, Oct 12, 2018 at 8:35 PM Melvin Carvalho
> <melvincarvalho@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> 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
> 

_______________________________
Mischa Tuffield PhD
http://mmt.me.uk/
@mischat