Questions for inrupt

One question that would be great to address is the relationship between inrupt and Solid. John mentioned that the December meeting might provide a good forum for helping to clarify things on this point. Specifically, I’m curious about IP ownership and how to protect against the possibility of future shareholders taking the corporation into harmful directions that might damage the Solid ecosystem. This is particularly relevant right now as Google+ end-users consider whether to pick up their marbles and move over. Thanks @MitziLaszlo.

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@happybeing, @eduardoinnorway, @pheyvaer, perhaps you have some questions?

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@JornWildt

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Well, I do have a horribly long rambling about POD data storage management at https://github.com/solid/solid-spec/issues/127. Could be nice to get some sort of recommendations (although the team has already been very kind to answer some of it).

It would also be nice to hear the team’s view on sorting and paging through large amount of data. See for instance https://github.com/solid/node-solid-server/issues/956.

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In general

  • What is the plan now? What kind of features will be added? What specs will be implemented? Where are you going? What can we expect?

  • How has Solid been received?

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Are you going to do anything about the default user experience for configuring access control? Right now it is a bit, well, rough :wink:

It could for instance for nice with a standard flow for asking for access. Now you have to send an e-mail to someone and ask them to go through the ACL UI and add the right webID.

And it gets even more tricky if you want to work with access for browser based web-apps where the Origin header comes into play …

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This question from @dlghwns740 in another thread seems appropriate here :slightly_smiling_face:

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Thank you for asking the community.

I am not into the debate about Solid +/- Inrupt, I believe it is natural that we need to boost now after all the years that have passed since the project started. To bring John onboard, a experience done it before entrepreneur with ton of contacts, and finance some critical things that the community needs to be able to move beyond the academical world, is a big step forward. As long as everything related to Solid as a technology is open source and based on standards, I am all in.

Besides sharing the vision of Solid, that my data should be owned by me and be able to controll who/what access it and when, the community around Solid+Inrupt is one of the best communities I have ever volunteered in. Mr Tim answers me and others when we have questions on Gitter, together with the rest of the Solids, Inrupters, I take of my hat to that any day of the week. Not to mention Ruben, the one man army, that is always one commit ahead of my thoughts :slight_smile: Mitzi is here and there all the time answering questions, gathering suggestions etc… I could name drop all day, so I just stop here.

I have no questions to Inrupt at the moment, I think that many things are going in the right direction, but I do have some thoughts/suggestions:

  • Involve the community more, we are many high skilled people that are just waiting to aid, for example advising, giving feedback on current things such as the new UI, Data Browser, before you release them.

  • Be more open with plans, thoughts etc, involve the community more, I understand that might be difficult in this early stage, but It might get some people to stop worry so much where things are going.

  • Create ambassadors, that can help to spread the gospel world wide in each country/continent.

  • Involve incubator, students, innovators, etc… into Solid and/or Inrupt projects.

Conclusion is that there is lot of heart from the community in what Solid could be, Inrupt is a must be according to me, but maybe not to others, what we could all agree on, is that more community interaction anywhere it is possible, can only be of good for the mission.

/Eduardo

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As we have discussed here "move it at any time, without interruption of service"?, I find Solid’s statement below rather bold:

Since you own your data, you’re free to move it at any time , without interruption of service.

You are of course free to move your data - but since your own data is most likely linked together with absolute URLs between your various items, your data cannot just be moved without also trying to modify URLs to match the new hostname.

What is the Solid team’s thoughts on this? Can we expect a different naming scheme (I guess not)? Should the Solid server provide some sort of standard export/import feature? Or something else?

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I would like to hear the team’s reasoning behind choosing the server’s file system as the back-end for the node Solid server?

It seems to me that, had the backend been a graph based database, we could have used SPARQL to query all the user’s data in one simple and consistent way, instead of, as it is now, we have to traverse the user’s container/folder structure and know or try to calculate where stuff is stored.

It could be interesting to hear the story behind the current implementation choices :slight_smile:

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Aside from SPARQL, we could look into AQL (ArangoDB Query Language).
I guess some kind of adapter / plugin system to link to different storage engines would be optimal.

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My question is:

A viable product is usually the best synergy of the maturation of underneath technology. Can Inrupt raise a campaign or competition to incent the community delivering sparkling and feasible product proposals or PoCs?

Thanks

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There are some factors that have been making Solid development a bit difficult for me.

  • The UI of the Solid server is unintuitive and often unpredictable and buggy.
  • The documentation behind Solid and the relevant libraries is sparse.
  • Maybe this is from lack of documentation, but I haven’t found good way to query for a triple in a user’s pod without manually traversing every file

What work is being done to help Solid become more developer-friendly?

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Questions about the Solid timeline:
What can the team share in terms of timelines for Solid and for the inrupt data browser?

In rough terms, when will:

  1. The data browser get a UI suitable for non-developers, even if it’s beta?
  2. The Solid server be beta (and what does “beta” mean to the team)?
  3. It be safe to migrate end-user data to Solid and/or inrupt hosting servers w/out fear that it could be lost (maybe that’s already the case)?

Also: is there a place where it will be streamed? I know a few folks (like me) who won’t be able to make it in-person but really want to hear the conversation.

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Inrutps’ website states that the apps are coming! What apps and/or UI (non-developer) has Inrupt fueled Solid with? Can you provide a demo pod to support your claims?

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I have a question now :slight_smile:

“If we organise a Solid Nordic Venue in Oslo next year, could Tim & John attend if we pick a good date for them both?” :hugs:

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We’re doing a live feed on Twitter at 12:30pm (EST): https://twitter.com/inrupt Please join us! :slight_smile:

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That was a great session. A big thanks to @MitziLaszlo and the whole inrupt crew for hosting that session. Super informative and I’m very appreciative of the transparency you all are bringing to this process.

Thank you.

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Thank you for all the great conversation, looking forward to taking the themes that were raised forward and talking more.

If you have more questions or comments please do keep them coming.

I’d love to hear your feedback about the Solid Boston event here Any feedback on the Solid Boston event?

Big thank you to everyone for making this happen!

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Thanks to the whole inrupt team for the event. It was very interesting and insightful. :slightly_smiling_face:

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