Self-nomination of CG co-chair

Dear Solid CG team,

Good morning/afternoon/evening.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to join the two meetings in the past two 
weeks, ans see the slightly complicated timezone issue (sorry I tend to 
think Anywhere on Earth...). I fully acknowldge the potential impact, 
but would still like to send this one out, also to share my two cents 
for some of the questions.


Info about myself: I'm Rui Zhao, started to work on Solid since 2022 
after joining University of Oxford's EWADA project as a postdoctoral 
research associate (and been in this role ever since). I mainly work on 
the research side, from complicated architectures/systems around Solid 
to small use cases of Solid, to investigate how Solid can be applied in 
different settings, and the boundary of the current protocol's 
capability. During the journey, I developed some Solid-related libraries 
and tools both for my own interest and to test my understandings of 
technology too. I've also become an active (if I may say) member of 
different Solid-related groups, from SolidOS, to Solid CG, and to LWS WG.

(Would be willing to give some pointers to relevant papers. But in 
general, my research is on data autonomy, data-flow governance and privacy.)


Despite being an academic researcher primarily, I also keep an eye on 
the practical challenges that Solid faces -- both the tecnology itself, 
and for creating a (larger) community by attracting outsiders. I've 
talked with some people, and heard their opinions and the blocking 
factors. Before Solid, I've had several times of active searching of 
decentralized technologies, especially social tools (SNS, IM, etc), and 
have used pretty-much all of them by then. Solid has a quite unique 
position for that, on two main parts (apart from RDF): 1) all data are 
stored in one place, so different apps/services can make use of any of 
them; 2) there exists (in principle) a data interoperability mechanism 
for cross-app (cross-client) data sharing. But that also makes Solid 
very disadvantageous, as it's very different from what people are used 
to nowadays -- platforms (combined "service"/"function" and "storage"). 
(And we don't want to lose Solid's unique stance.)

Thus, the client-client interoperability is indeed an important factor, 
and I fully agree and support efforts for that. Besides creating 
standardard vocabularies (and/or ontologies) and (simple) wrappers 
around them, I would like to emphasize the importance of a "modal": to 
actually create a set of applications that demonstrates the power of the 
interoperability approach. This has been a question for many, and having 
a demostration of Solid's most-promised (and distinct, compared to other 
PDS == Personal Data Stores) feature of interoperability would be a very 
important step towards showcasing to and attracting outsiders; I also 
learned this the hard way for my research. It both proves the technology 
does work, and provides references on how that can be done, and 
hopefully generalizable.

In addition to that, one thing I believe missing is the lack of 
convenient libraries / tools / resources for developers. At the moment, 
developers need to decide from scratch what they need and want to  do 
for their Solid App -- that is not an easy job, both for Solid's design 
(i.e. PDS), and also for RDF. I've repeatedly heard how one should use 
RDF to express data, and where to put data in Solid Pods, and confused 
on where to start with; different people also got different preferences 
and suggestions. Of course, we would still like to keep that as an 
option, but we can move forward towards a particular direction: to 
create tools/libraries for building "typical" apps. That means, to 
create libraries for building apps of some specific feature 
requirements. The most prominent is single-user apps, where all data are 
stored to the person's own Pod; then, there can be friend-aware apps, 
where some data are in the user's own Pod, and some are in friends' 
Pods; then social apps, where (data) interactions happen between the 
user's and friends' Pods; alternatively also "collective" apps (e.g. 
social media), where index-like mechanism is needed, and there needs 
ways to keep track of interactions / activities. They have different 
underlying data handling and data *locationing* requirements, and the 
library/libraries should abstract this away, to provide the developer a 
peace of mind in that the data can be handled corectly. The "peace of 
mind" is what I see most important here, rather than performance (etc).


So in general, I feel the CG should st up some guidance goals for people 
to think about and potentially work on. From time to time, we may want 
to reflect on how well the goals are met, and if any synergy can be 
made. Of course, it can only be "guidance", due to the nature of the CG; 
but it would be better if somehow the CG (or together with some other 
groups) managed to work on it together (even just for a small fraction 
of time). The discussion above about client-client interop and 
convenient libraries are both two possible common goals that I see are 
very important. I understand there are many affairs that the CG can work 
on, more than the two practical questions above, such as protocol 
evolvement and experimental features. But afterall, all of them has one 
major common goal: to make Solid appropriate for more (or all) types of 
services/apps.

Of course, some documentation needs to be done for that, and we may also 
develop some tools for hosting/viewing/editing such documentation along 
the way; to start with, maybe reusing existing tools is necessary. The 
goals shall come from the group's discussion, and some relations (e.g. 
prority, dependency) will be put between them; I think the chairs can 
put some small efforts in maintining the documentation from the discussions.

If I were elected, apart from regular CG activities, I would try to push 
the CG to spend some effort in this direction, and take the 
responsibility to maintain the document to start with.


So, that's my two cents. Hope that's useful, and looking forward to any 
comments.


Best regards,

Rui

-- 
Rui Zhao
Postdoc @ EWADA (Ethical Web And Data Architecutres in the Age of AI)
Human-Centred Computing, Dept. Computer Science
University of Oxford
https://me.ryey.icu

Received on Thursday, 20 November 2025 00:55:35 UTC