Yesterday I had the privilege to give a webinar on Solid to an international group involved in smart cities - the effort to use tech to make cities more sustainable and livable. The group was very excited about Solid and considers privacy a key issue in their efforts. Several of them have projects ready to go and are looking for help from the Solid community so if any of you are interested, please speak up.
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Wow, @jeffz, nice job!! The cities of Oakland, Portland, and others are going to get together to build a Solid app? How cool is that?!
Hopefully the participants there can come to the forum and tell us more. We would love to hear about it even if they already have vendors lined up.
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This is great. I am interested
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Thank you Jeff, the talk you gave was very interesting to our community. Many are struggling with how to customize city services to individual needs without gathering vast amounts of personal data. Apart from the obvious problem that this data collected in one place can be a target for abuse, requiring applications to use such centralized data sources is not interoperable, portable across cities, extensible, or cost-effective. We have a large and growing community of cities looking for solutions and the Solid community may be exactly the kind of community that could deliver those solutions. We have started a catalog of projects indexing them by type. We are also early in building this community but would love to pick a couple of projects and see what can be done.
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Thanks, Wilf, I was very excited by the projects your group is undertaking and agree that Solid and Smart Cities are a good match. @aveltens, a very active developer, has expressed an interest also, so we can hopefully begin looking at specific projects and evaluating how close we could be to real life implementations or whether we are still in the proof of concept stages.
@MitziLaszlo - the whole domain of smart cities is perfect for real life Solid applications since data privacy is a key element and public agencies a likely source of early adopters. Perhaps Inrupt would like to be involved in these discussions?
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