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This Week in Solid 2019-12-18

Hello and welcome to another edition of This Week in Solid!

Solid is a set of open specifications, built on existing open standards, that allows users to switch between storage and app while taking the data along.

This is the last edition of 2019 so here’s a recap of This Year in Solid to look at the highlights of the year.

solidproject.org is live and up to date

At the start of the year information about Solid was dispersed over various locations, by different people, sometimes duplicated and even conflicting. Over the year we have come together to collect the information about Solid in a single repository (which was called ‘Information’). This was the base content used to build solidproject.org which was put together with a lot of hard work from the Creators. This website is being maintained regularly so that it is up to date with the latest information.

A mailing list was set up

This Week in Solid has been set up as a touch point to easily stay in the loop and share information with each other. Rather than having to check many channels and reach out to several people This Week in Solid has meant people working on Solid are more in the loop with what’s going on.

The process of working in the Solid GitHub was recorded

Solid has grown meaning that more and more people are contributing and knowing how to slot in as a newcomer or how to get an overview of what others are working on and how to work together is more complex. Over the year we have worked on recording who works on what and where so that newcomers know how to support others and when to start new projects. In particular, the process for improving the Solid standard has been defined along with teams defined by expertise and responsibility and shared milestones.

Weekly recurring and well-attended calls on specific themes to develop Solid

Every Thursday there has been a W3C Solid Community Group alternating between 16:00 CET and 10:00 CET. On top of that, there have been more in-depth calls on specific topics such as authentication, data interoperability, and authorisation. Read more about when these calls are if you are interested in joining.

25 Solid Events, 60+ talks and 150+ articles mentioning Solid

Over the year there have been more than sixty talks mentioning Solid along with 150+ articles. Looking forward to many more in the coming year. Over 2019 we had 25 Solid Events in 18 locations in the USA, Europe, and China. Solid Events have been a great way for local communities to form around their interest in Solid. Thank you to all the hard work by the event organisers for making this happen! Anyone can become a Solid Event organiser. Reach out to other Solid Event organisers or contact the Solid Manager if you would like to brainstorm ideas and learn how to make a successful local community.

Solid standardisation work

The Solid standard is still a work in progress. At the start of the year, Solid was being worked on in several different repositories asynchronously by many people with a variety of focuses. Now, there is a clear agreed destination where to put the final result as well as defined milestones. Work on the test suite which is incorporated into the Solid standard has also started led by Kjetil Kjernsmo.

The Solid properties have been collected and maintained by the Administrators

Solid properties, such as domains, hosting, and chat tools were organised organically by a variety of people meaning that when services needed maintenance it was not clear who was able to carry that out. This year a defined group called the Administrators have been carefully collecting and maintaining Solid properties to ensure consistent maintenance and a single touch point to flag issues.

More extensive and organised documentation for developers working with Solid

As part of the Solid website launch a major effort went underway to collect material for developers as well as mature the content. Some big advances include triple doc and an exploration of client-side RDF libraries.

Course teaching how to build a Solid app at University of Oviedo led by Jose Emilio Labra Gayo

Building a Solid application became part of an assignment for a course in software architecture taught in the second semester of the third year of the Bachelor’s degree in Software Engineering at the School of Computer Science from the University of Oviedo, Spain taught by Jose Emilio Labra Gayo. 116 students were grouped in teams of four to eight students to describe the architecture a Solid chat app and to implement a prototype using open-source software. Although the students had previous knowledge of programming languages like Java and JavaScript most of them had no knowledge of RDF or semantic technologies which was also not part of the course. Despite this, fourteen groups managed to develop a Solid chat app. Mitzi László and Jose Emilio Labra Gayo assessed the fourteen apps to select a winner based on predefined criteria. At the prize ceremony, Mitzi László gave a talk about Solid, to both the students and several local companies including Empathy, Izertis, and The Cocktail. Empathy went on to employ two of the students on the course to continue working on Solid as part of the company.

Several teams working full time to implement Solid in practice

The Solid standard needs to be implemented to demonstrate it in practice. Here are few updates from the teams who have been busy with this:

Wishlist and what to look forward to in 2020

There’s plenty of work to carry out in the year to come. Here’s a little list of things that people have mentioned they would love to see happen in 2020: stable standard, improved onboarding, user friendly apps, multiple Pod implementations, and better developing tools.

Until next year :)

Mitzi László