I think the idea that those on the forum would work from a frozen version of what is a very fluid solid spec, and that there be little feedback or iteration, or need to adapt to spec changes, which are especially needed in the case of shapes for interoperability, is problematic.
sorry, I donāt think think sarcasm, āthem and usā and assumptions will help improve the communicationā¦
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Ok, thanks, I edited itā¦hopefully better now
yep, and I think you have a valid point! how do you handle shapes at the moment?
Iām not coding now, sadly, but I hope to get back to it sometime. What I had in mind are shapes for chat apps so that hopefully someone can make one that can interop with other chat apps and maybe use that really cool Say editor 
So this is a good example of possibly improving the synergy between different parts of the community. Maybe some shapes for interop could be put out there, with the understanding that they will change, so that devs here can start to incorporate them and anticipate changes. Without expecting the shapes to be perfect or final on the first iteration.
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I think bridging is the best answer, but it could take many forms, broadly:
- Human (active cross-posters, etc.)
- Modification of content (annotation, linking, etc)
- External service (summarizing, topic identification/monitoring, etc.)
- Full-blown knowledge base with automatic/assisted concept extraction
This is actually an important general problem IMO.
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The aforementioned discourse2gitter plugin looks like a good low-effort option to me, for starters.
It would serve to notify core members of all ongoing forum activity.
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Iām not saying donāt try it, I think itās a good idea but I think we would have more chance with buy in from more of those closely involved in and particularly directing development of Solid. I canāt understand how Inrupt can put itself in a position of de facto owning the development of Solid and much of its ecosystem, also the main communally resources (such as the forum, and gitter moderation) without being much more transparent, or engaging with the community when we ask about certain things. I asked to discuss this separately from this particular question but that was met by silence, and I think this is a pattern which is a significant causal factor in what we trying to fix in this topic.
Cross posting/bridge will help raise awareness. Having the people who are involved in development, and particularly the big hitters hanging out here and engaging with questions about the direction of Solid and answering when people ask questions that the community cannot, is necessary for the forum to get established. I think we probably lose people when questions are not answered about strategy, plans, and security or privacy concerns. Not just those who ask, but those who see this.
Weāve see it again in this thread. In my view it undermines their credibility, and affects respect, commitment and morale in the community. In that respect I think itās an anti pattern.
That may sound strong. The reason I feel strongly is because I believe in the goals of empowering people, restoring privacy and autonomy, and building the open, accessible, democratised internet for everyone, and Iām concerned that the issues raised here jeopardise our ability to improve those things with Solid.
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The goal should be long term to get both forum and chat onto solid-based equivalents, of course. I to a certain extent have made my peace with gitter in that I have written code to keep a solid archive of chats I follow including solid/chat. I did this because I was worried about a few things about gitter ā that it was not standard, that gitter.com could disappear with all the community knowledge with it.
Anyone else could do the same. Also we could look at ways of just syncing parts of pods, like those chat archives. I guess @happybeing you could take a copy of everything on SAFE or IPFS for that matter.
(Of course a nice tool would be one which extracts a long thread from gitter and reformats it as a forum postā¦ but that would need root on both sides to be able to map different userās comments and simulate their posts on the forum. Or it could do a sort of quote the original posterās names for it like matrix-gitter bot does.)
Yes, really long-term. Imho dogfooding Solid for its own toolset is a nice-to-have at best and should be really low-priority. I created this thread (and others before that) to indicate way more urgent issues for the Solid initiative:
-
People donāt get Solid, and it is still not clearly positioned.
- I posted about this (here, here and here) but also the Vision Panel has no solution still.
-
Tools and communications are fragmented, making it easy to miss ongoing activity.
- Three landing pages for Solid (solid.mit.edu, solidproject.org, inrupt.com). If you ask me solidproject.org should be the main entrypoint to Solid. The MIT site should redirect to it, and Inrupt.com should be differently positioned (as it tackles the commercial side of things). Inrupt cannot be central (again wholly imho).
- Nineteen (!) github repositories for Panel discussions. Why arenāt these taking place on this discussion forum? (Note that Discourse has github integration plugin, so you can still have work documents there).
- Gitter has the core team interacting
- This forum has some community member discussion
-
Solid is not actively reaching out, onboarding, building community, and hence has a high barrier to entry
- A bunch of articles promise revolutionary change (exciting!) but landing pages offer little info, spec is mostly empty, etc.
Since I started monitoring Solid over a year ago I have seen numerous people getting confused, disinterested or getting a āSolid, mehā impression. And in this thread I got the impression that among invested community members there is a lot of frustration not being addressed.
It could well be that there is a well-founded strategy behind this. Might also be that commercial activities take precedence. Whatever it is, to me it seems worthwhile to discuss more openly, and tackle the issues (or provide pointers if that already happened).
Edit: I am delighted to find more solid information on solidproject.org so thatās moving in the right direction.
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I think aside from Inruptās commercial focus, which is as to be expected since its a market funded startup, the problems have to do with spec issues. Since Solid connects the desktop with the web, the spec necessarily has all kinds of intricacies and corner cases. I think this is being addressed but the number of spec issues (imho) came as a surprise. Also, the concepts of user level programming (as explained in https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/TabulatorGoals.html and https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Footprints.html ) which also are pretty revolutionary, are added to the mix at the same time. Maybe some sort of iterative spec-design-implement-spec process with a more focused group is needed. I thought the panels were a great idea but they seem to require a commitment that is beyond what part-timers can deliver, and a lot of spec issues span different panels.
Also I think Solid needs a white paper, a yellow paper, and a beige paper.
The forum [ā¦] is used by some community members as something supplementary to Gitter chat.
Github and Gitter is where it is happening, and then all across the web, including here by some of us. For me that is good to know, as I am used to these kinds of forums to be central to a community, but there is not really a community, only a forum (solidproject.org also indicates that with a single āForumā link and āIntegrate Solidā leading to a business intake process).
I did spend a lot of time here suggesting improvements to Solid positioning, organization and community structure, but that may be a bit of a waste of time 
However, all this should be more clearly communicated to all current and future solid members.
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Well sure the community needs organization. And I think this tool could help us https://igipartners.com/read-holacracy-comic-book-free#page-78-79 seems to be adapted to a live moving adaptable organization
The first thing to do is to define āRolesā that we have or need and then see who fill them.
I start :
- Community Manager : @MitziLaszlo
- Welcome New comers : All
- Libraries dev : @jeffz , @Vincent, @RubenVerborgh
- Apps dev : lot of us
- Interconnexion with other technos : ActivityPub : @aschrijver Safe: @happybeing, gundb @glensimister
- Node solid server dev : @megothā¦
- webcomponents : sveltejs : @happybeing ,
- Pod provider : @ewingson
- pod community maintenance : abourgeois
ā¦
Iām limited to 10 mention in one post but we could put it on a pod
What roles do I forget ?
Put here the role we need or we takeā¦ And letās see what happens
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Also take a look at Sociocracy 3.0, as it is less formal than Holacracy and formatted as a pattern library, so you can easily adopt only the good / needed parts.
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One or another, or the best of eachā¦
-> new role 'Propose & Compare alternative gouvernance pattern ā -> @aschrijver 
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Ha ha, I donāt know if either are really needed actually. Imho we should use Discourse forum features to maximum extent, optimize a process based on that and document it in an easily reachable location on the forum (either in the menu, or global pinned topic, or something). Keep it small and simple
Which Discourse forum features did you have in mind?
Perhaps youād be interested in https://github.com/solid/process
Yes, actually just yesterday I was commenting on the process, suggesting possible forum features that can be used to model Panels on the forum. See here and continued here.
PS. I was a bit disappointed about the apparent minor role of the forum (which I believed to be central communication hub to the Solid project + community, at least in theory). Felt my time spent on earlier suggestions for improvement of Solid movement where a bit wasted. But I have overcome that feeling of frustration, and may or may not transfer old topics to various panel repoās
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