Welcome to the Solid Forum, please introduce yourself here. Great to have you on board

#178

Hi. I’m Miguel Ceriani, a CS researcher, currently working in a university in the south of Italy (University of Bari). My main research topics are linked data, semantic web, paradigms/UIs for visual querying/exploration of (semi-)structured data. I am interested in data ethics and worried about the current trend in hyper-centralization and commodification of personal data, relationships, and communication.

I have been following the development of Solid and now I would like to find ways to contribute and exchange ideas. I am especially interested in supporting communities in Solid, by favouring sharing data and practices among people with similar interests.

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#179

Welcome everybody!

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#180

Hey etio! Welcome to Solid. I’m the Product Designer at Inrupt-- nice to see another designer 'round these parts. Feel free to connect if you want to talk shop :slight_smile: We also have a Women of Solid group if you’re interested in joining!
https://www.womenofsolid.org/

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#181

:smiley:!! awesome, thank you for the invite.

#182

Hey guys, I’m an entrepreneur working on a project to decentralize data control of performance and talent data of all workers. – I believe that Solid would be the foundation. - I’m here to learn everything I can, and meet developers interested in the project to exchange ideas.

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#183

Welcome in the community @danieldone. It sounds very interesting your project. Is it a kind of professional network? I developed myself some ideas in this area a couple of years ago, before I came to Solid. I think it is very important at the moment for Solid to build professional useful applications. You can take a look to this post to lern about the small company I’m currently involved.

#184

Hey @rodant! :slight_smile: Sorta, actually it’s a weird situation… I’ve been working the past year on finding the root to several future of work, hr, people data, collaboration, job sourcing, and retraining challenges everyone is experiencing, and found that at the core, people do not have access to or a way to understand and use the data they create about themselves even though there is a MOUNTAIN of data about them on every work app from slack, to zoom, to jira, trello, etc… We can fix most problems by inverting the data ownership model granting access control from the ground up, fed through API, processed through NLP.

We arrived at this conclusion after 10 iterations speaking with investors and users, with two soft no code demos.

However, due to the transcendence in scope we’re having to expand our view of how we’re thinking about our technology and system architecture.

Our task evolved into needing to build a platform that

  1. Gives each user power over their data, and the choice for when and how it is shared with their teams, groups or the public.
  2. A dynamic user database that is fed by NLP processed API data from their daily work as well as a few other sources.
    2.a. Useful and powerful data visualizations on: Performance, gained talents, skills, and experience, as well as other information on their interactions with others, as well as neural diversity and emotional intelligence insights.
  3. Set goals for yourself, measure and track success
  4. Get career observations and AI suggestions for self improvement.

Everything else comes off that foundation.

The idea being if people Know Themselves they have the power to make themselves and their teams better. If this works for everyone, and the difference is at least 1% this idea could make the world a $1trillion more productive each year. --And I think a lot more people would be happy in their careers.

I think maybe I had heard about Solid in passing a few years ago, but after seeing Sir Tim in the news again this month, I dug deeper because the technology seemed to resonate with where we’ve discovered we need to go.

And I’ve been asking people I’ve met here on the form through DMs - Now I’m convinced that this is not just he platform to do what we’re being told is needed, but I feel like I’ve found our “people”

So I’m currently mapping out how Solid could be the foundation of a concept we’ve already designed and nocode demoed form an UX, and validated… And I want to do it with as much community support as possible. I think we got a few things wrong in our current draft. It’s written with a lesser understanding of the existing technology, legality, and culture of the decentralized web community. — but yeah, if anyone wants to take a look at what we’ve got so far, I’d love to talk.

Really, we just wandered into the back door of the decentralized web party by chasing a ‘need’ and found ourselves late to the party we didn’t even know we wanted to be at. Now it’s time for us to learn/ explore this idea further.

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#185

@danieldone - you might be interested in timbl’s work on the contacts pane of the databrowser which deals with ontologies for organizations and individuals.

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#186

Hi I’m Joshua, been a corporate in house developer for 16 years, working with web solutions APIs and primarily a DBA, Coldfusion developer, and .net developer.

I love the concept of Solid and pod focused development work, I can’t stop thinking about it’s implementations and telling folks that know nothing about it what its uses could be (mulitple so far Health Care, Sales, shared cataloging in marketplaces that are developed for business, how might twitter, salesforce/crm, ticketing, events and HR).

I’ve be completely ADHD and this has lit a fuse in my excitement about the future of Technology, I’m headed for a change in career and I’m certain that Solid design/implementation will be part of what I’m doing. My passion is ignited and while I’m not so sure I’m going to solely be a developer would be great to be involved in just architecture and tools discussions.

Looking forward to participating.

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#187

Hey, @danieldone thanks for your extensive sharings. It looks to be well-founded and in alignment with the Solid idea. Our team is still working on the foundations for a reliable Solid infrastructure, but such applications are in our scope in the future too. In any case, we are very interested in your results and happy to get in touch for an exchange.

#189

Good morning, my name is Stefano, I am Italian and I work in digital communication and dissemination processes. I approached Solid because I am interested in exploring technologies for disintermediation, sharing and participation of content and information. I’m interested in social use, management and moderation, autonomy of decision-making processes in businesses and organizations. I don’t know if I can ever be useful to this community, I’m not a techie. I’m here now mostly to get to know Solid.

#190

Hi everyone. I’m Wouter, a Master Computer Science student at the Free University of Amsterdam. I’m following the track Software Engineering & Green IT and am in the second year.

For my master project I have contacted a researched at my university that is specialized in ICT for Development. After some brainstorming we came with the idea to do research about Solid, as we we’re very interested in the capabilities of Solid and what it stands for. Also, we heard about the call from Tim for a need of new deployments of applications and testing in diverse contexts. Therefore we came with the idea to evaluate how Solid can be applied in low-resource environments (like in third-world countries), with possible barriers and possible new ideas. Another student I’m brainstorming with is also doing a master project around the topic.
We are thinking about the possibilities of creating a proof-of-concept, an application, possible tests in the field and more, but currently we are mostly in a design/planning/experimental phase.

For this reason I wanted to say hi. This forum seems like a great welcoming place to ask questions and I might ask some in the future!
If you have any ideas in mind or suggestions about my master project, don’t hesitate to let me know!
Thanks for reading and I look forward to talking to everyone.

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#191

Hi everyone! I’m Teodora and I study my master’s in Parallel and Distributed Systems at Free University Amsterdam.

Just as my colleague Wouter, who has just presented himself before me, I am working on my master project, involving Solid and exploring the applications it could have in low resource environments.

We started a new thread where we discuss our projects and we would be happy to hear your thoughts there:

I am excited to join the community and looking forward to learning more about Solid along the way.

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#192

My name is Dave Evans and I live in Vermont. By way of introduction, take a look at what I wrote 1996:

Digicraft’s initial product offering is code-named “The Chop”. The Chop is a technology which enables software developers to create software containers for portable digital identities which can be transferred between a variety of computing and communications platforms. A digital identity can be made up of a users marketing information, images, sounds, calendar, security keys, medical data, website preferences and much more. The Chop acts as a data container which consumers fill up with any type of data which can be easily and securely transferred between computers, PDA’s, smart cards and mobile phones

We believe the revenue model most suited to succeed will be one based on free online distribution of a client-side application which will contain a basic version of the Chop capable of automatically filling out online forms with data entered into the Chop by users. Users will simply drag a Chop icon from their desktop onto any form capable of reading Chop data(Chop friendly), and the Chop will read the form, fill it out with the appropriate data and allow the user to add additional information before submitting the form back to the server.

Once internet services such as portals, websites and corporate extranets realize the benefits of Chop personalization, they will license the server side software which enables them to take advantage of the data contained in the Chop, whether it be marketing information for a for consumer goods, medical data for the healthcare industry or personalization data for portals. Exact details regarding the nature of these licensing arrangements are currently under investigation.

The Chop will increase consumer confidence regarding e-commerce, increase the amount and type of sensitive transactions occurring over the internet, increase the amount and complexity of online business-to-business transactions, enhance website personalization and create an exciting new way to for people to identify themselves online.

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#193

Hi! I am Yves and I’m from Belgium. I discovered Solid last year thanks to an interview with Tim Berners Lee in the newspaper De Standaard and the concept really piqued my interest. The inherent goal to put people’s data back in their own hands is quite something. Thanks to an evening course in network management I finished almost 3 years ago, a few months of experience in IT last year and a bit of online studying in the past months (including here) I have a basic understanding how those pods would benefit users in many ways. The fact that the Flemish government is working on a citizen pod for all of us is also promising, I’m just hoping it becomes a solution and not another problem, which tends to happen often in Belgium. Anyway, I’m looking forward to see how this plays out and will probably try my hand at creating my own pod on the Inrupt Pod Spaces after I read up on the documentation :slight_smile:

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#194

Hi Marco here. good to learn more about the Solid effort. Been on the web for some time and have observed the WWW evolution with great interest and of course took the Semantic Web detour as well like so many of you here. I hope to see the two worlds get closer again by way of a Solid effort.

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#195

Hi
I am Lachie Ryan and I work as an enterprise business architect. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/lachlan-ryan-2193594/)

I think that Solid can help create privacy aware services that empower people and organisations to act transparently and ethically.

It seems to me it could be possible to use the Solid principles to develop patterns of service provision that meet the intent of government programs in a wide range of domains including taxation, health, education, income support, and service provision.

I would love to hear from people who are further along that path.

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#196

Hi there!

I’m Michael, and I’m a web developer with fifteen years experience, who’s focused mainly on the server, but is competent enough in the browser, too. My interest in Solid might be a little unusual – though, reading some of these posts, maybe not that much – in that I found it after spending some years tinkering with some ideas around a no-code application framework. About three years ago, I thought I’d learn just what this whole “semantic web” thing was about, and quickly fell down a very deep rabbit hole, lured along by how I kept thinking through technical problems of integrating RDF into my ideas and discovering that its core data model – sets of triples – made tidy, powerful solutions perfectly natural. It wasn’t too long before I got into logic programming, and its potential was immediately obvious.

So, I’m currently building an RDF-based logic runtime in TypeScript: GitHub - mpabst/codex. It’s very rough right now, though I seem to have the basics of top-down evaluation working. I have plans to add incremental, bottom-up eval, and a state model that combines the ideas of Redux and Functional-Reactive Programming with Git’s directed, acyclic graph of patches. (You can see a sketch of the core system in Prolog, with a complete event loop that takes user input and renders HTML: GitHub - mpabst/Fingerpaint) I also have plans for a server component, backed by TerminusDB, and ultimately that no-code framework that was the genesis of the project. I have a keen suspicion that logic programming, despite its reputation for complexity, can be made simple enough to let casual users figure out simple coding tasks just by following interface hints, and let more experienced developers build sophisticated features with less time and effort than in other languages, by applying an FRP idiom and thereby constraining side-effects, which appear to be the source of the trouble.

I’m also very interested in the social goals of Solid, and its effort to wrest control of the Web back from the hands of capitalism. I have a nearly lifelong interest in progressive causes, and despite some very grim and frustrating experiences nonetheless believe a better world is possible. While I tend to spend more time thinking about code than privacy, I am very encouraged that what looks like a natural home for my technical ideas has exactly the social ones I find appealing.

To date, I’ve been slogging away on my project totally solo, with even my developer friends only able to nod and say “I don’t get it, but I’m happy you’re excited.” :smiley: If anyone is interested in contributing I would, of course, be delighted, but I’d also love to chat with people in general about the finer points of RDF, the semantic web, making coding easier, and logic programming. I’m sure there’s a great deal more to learn – I’ve also only been doing self-study – and it’s entirely possible I’m completely missing some key ideas. I’ve already tossed my prior work three or four times now, as I discover new things, so any would-be contributors beware. :joy:

Personally, I also enjoy cycling, dancing, meditation, journaling, and working out more generally, and I like to keep up on the news in astronomy and clean energy.

Don’t be afraid to say hi if any of this caught your interest, and I look forward to meeting all of you and learning more!

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#197

Hi all -

My name is Randy. I’ve most recently been a business intelligence developer for my career, and have some exposure to software development - all mostly along Microsoft technologies. To be clear, I’m not a “Microsoft guy”; it’s just been a consequence of my career.

I’m interested in Solid because I personally think the greatest technical sin of my generation (“millennials”) is the creation of social media, echo chambers, etc. Solid actually aligns with another idea I had about 3 years ago (I actually tried to apply at one point to Inrupt) of trying to solve the data problem; but instead of at the protocol level, at the database level (since I’ve been mostly a data developer.) To that end I tried to develop in my own spare time my own database system from scratch, with … limited success. But it’s been “fun.”

I’m coming back to Solid after first learning about it a few years back to understand what progress the project has made, and what remains to be made.

I’m motivated because I think the internet today sucks, and while the internet of today is better in many ways than the internet of my youth, it’s also very worse: Surveillance capitalism, disinformation, echo chambers, ads and newsletters everywhere, etc.

I am hoping companies like Inrupt, Mozilla, etc, can help change this dynamic. And if I can contribute meaningfully (I’m unsure how), I’m all for it.

You can find me on Github at:

And you can find my thoughts at:

<3

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Is RDF "hard"?
#198

Hello there,

I’m KrishnaPrasath. I’m a software engineer for the last couple of years and a few months. Nothing interesting enough to post it here. But I work in React most of the time.

I’m excited about Solid’s idea. Would love to be a part of the community. :metal:

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