Hey everyone!
It’s been a while since I last engaged in conversations here. I have been silently following Solid’s unfolding. And meanwhile a post which I created several Solid stages ago (Solid for non geek users) caught the attention of SLA Europe and they invited me to share my thoughts and perspectives on Solid as a non-techie user having tried it
So, I will be speaking about what I know about Solid - general basic stuff. The more intriguing part is where I will be trying to imagine possible and plausible futures for Solid and libraries.
Any thoughts and comments are welcome if can think of something or already know of something.
By now, my metaphor will be with my favourite scene from the movie Time Machine. And I will be imagining the hologram being fed with different data, one of them from the hero’s Solid pod.
Skohub.io is a project sponsored by a library service center in Germany, the idea of which is to use SKOS vocabularies as information hubs where users can follow subjects through ActivityPub enabled services like Mastodon. A blog post here describes an example. For this they use a SkoHub-PubSub server that implements a subset of ActivityPub. I’m not that familiar with it, but it seems that if the server were a Solid server, it would probably offer more to publishers and subscribers in ways not really thought of yet.
Creating a one button ‘deploy to the cloud’ script/template for node solid server that libraries or similar non-profits could experiment with would not be that hard and would probably be useful. Microsoft for example offers credits to eligible non profits for Azure services.
But I imagine the hard part for a library would be coming up with and policing a policy for pod use. I would imagine that it would be similar to their policies on internet use. Having pods available under the libraries control might be good for those not tech savvy but in need of such a thing to get along in this digital world. It would be a new area for them and probably they would wait to see if there was sufficient demand from library users, but it is in keeping with how the mission of libraries has expanded in the digital era.
-edit-
Not saying that Microsoft will be the guardian of our digital future, its just that something like Azure might make the one button nss deploy easy
(Solid for non geek users) caught the attention of SLA Europe and they invited me to share my thoughts and perspectives on Solid as a non-techie user having tried it 
