next step for the Solid WG charter

Dear all,

(this is a summary of a point I already presented during Wednesday's 
call [1])

we have received a long awaited review from the TAG (the W3C Technical 
Architecture Group) on the Solid WG charter proposal [2]. This review 
echos and synthesizes a number of comments already made by some of the 
AC reviewers. It makes addressing those concerns even more pressing, and 
my belief is that this requires a drastic change in the charter proposal.

I gave a lot of thoughts to the following sentence, from the TAG review 
: "we see an extremely broad problem space, and a single proposed 
solution". I believe this summarizes the crux of the concerns raised 
about the charter, but also points to a possible resolution. It is true 
that the Solid community has huge ambitions (reframing the way web 
applications are built and used, giving back the users control over 
their data...). But what we want to get out of this WG is not a complete 
and definitive answer to all of these ambitions. PR 62 [3] was an 
attempt in that direction, but it might not be suffisient: neither in 
terms of narrowing down the problem space, nor in term of broadening the 
solution space.

If I had to give an elevator pitch of the Solid protocol (i.e. the 
expected deliverable of the proposed WG), it would be :
* a evolution of the LDP protocol
* + a standard way of authenticating users
* + a standard way of specifying access control

So my idea is that, instead of pushing for a "Solid WG", why not propose 
an "LDP 2.0 WG", chartered to produce 3 specifications : LDP 2.0 
(client-server protocol), LDP-OIDC (authentication based on OIDC) and 
LDP-AC (access control). The corresponding Solid specifications could 
serve as a basis for these deliverables, but so could other similar 
specifications (e.g. https://open-services.net/). Ideally, the resulting 
specs would be entirely satisfying for Solid, meaning that a Solid POD 
would simply be required to comply with the 3 new LDP specs. Possibly, a 
few Solid-specific additions would be required, that could be specified 
as a very thin addition (a profile ?) of the new LDP.

Before I move forward with this idea and start drafting a new charter, 
I'd like to know how this community feels about that?

   pa


[1] https://github.com/solid/specification/pull/597

[2] https://github.com/w3c/strategy/issues/377#issuecomment-1790209071

[3] https://github.com/solid/solid-wg-charter/pull/62