Solid Practitioners collaboration

The Solid Practitioners group, as some of you may know, is a new initiative
of the Solid Team to support the work of those building real-world Solid
solutions.  We want to be able to explore the practical side of our
applications without getting side-tracked by specification issues but still
have a way to feed back our learning to the specification process.   This
communication between practitioners and spec writers is important to all of
us, so we'd like to start with a general plan of collaboration between the
Practitioners and the CG.

We decided that we first want to discuss among ourselves, from a practical
point of view what we currently use and what we need.  This may include
both Solid and non-Solid resources.  A project building software for the
homeless cares more about getting the software working than whether it is
done using a given protocol.  Then, we can pull together a list of things
that are common to all of us - what we need and what has worked or not
worked.  Then we'd ask for a special topic session of the CG, at which
point the CG can get clarity on the practitioner issues and the
practitioners can get clarity on how their needs relate to existing specs,
future work-items, or to possible collaborations between Solid and
non-Solid solutions.

So taking the topic of search as an example :

### Initial Practitioners Meeting on Search

* what is working now?
    * hear from Trinpod and INRIA
    * hear from other Practitioners about what they use (Solid and not
Solid)
* what do Practitioners need?
    * Practitioners discuss use cases and requirements

### CG Special Topic (with participation by reps from Practitioners)

* how do practitioner needs relate to the specs
    * discussion of related current specs, possible new work items,
possible external collabs
    * clarification of requirements and use cases

The initial meeting on search will be on Monday, February 12th. We would
like to request a joint special topic session of the CG at the CG's
convenience, hopefully in February.

Members of the CG, are, of course, always welcome at Practitioners
meeting.  We ask that you make space for practitioners to talk about their
current experience before moving the conversation to how that relates to
the specs.

Meetings are every other Monday at 18:00 UTC at
https://meet.jit.si/solid-practitioners. More details and meeting
agendas/notes available in our github repo at
http://github.com/solid-contrib/practitioners.

-- 

Jeff Zucker
Facilitator, Solid Practitioners Group