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

[threetriplets]

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.

[yvesdilien]

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

[neumarcx]

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.

[lachieJ]

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.

[mpabst]

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.” 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.

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!

[dynamoRando]

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:

dynamoRando - Overview

And you can find my thoughts at:

Rando Dynamo

<3

[murdoc077]

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.

[aschrijver]

Welcome to Solid, @murdoc077

I think there’s an excellent opportunity in this community to help with front-end related tasks. Many developers here are experimenting with exciting concept, but on a deep technical level and often more on the back-end. More UX polish to tools and apps might help greatly to inspire more people to jump in on the community. As for inspiration… look at some fabulous past work by @glensimister in this topic: The POD could do with a face lift. Can I help? - #23 by glensimister

[murdoc077]

Thank you, will look into that

[yudai007004]

Hello, everyone.

My name is Yudai. I’m Japanese. I’m sorry if my English is not good enough.
I joined the community because I was interested in The Solid projects. I found Solid when I wanted to create a product that would allow individuals to own their data. Let me learn a lot from you.

[bourgeoa]

Happy to have you on board.
Please ask questions.

There are many https://gitter.im/solid channels, a https://solidproject.org web site and lot of documentation on the different https://github.com/solid repos of the solid organisation.

[jimstclairLFPH]

Hi, I’m Jim St.Clair, Exec Director of Linux Foundation Public Health. I’ve been actively involved in decentralized identity for healthcare and would love to collaborate on solid personal data stores in healthcare and digital twins.

[rodriguezbrown]

Hi, I’m Rodriguez Brown.

1. I recently opened a discussion/issue here: GitHub with Solid, Is it possible that Matrix supports Solid?, Tutanota with Solid, Beaker Browser with Solid, Agregore Web Browser with Solid, Min Browser with Solid, Min Browser with Solid
2. I’m involved in several initiatives of different network protocols, apps, open/libre or closed software.
3. I know programming languages like: php, python and js. Also, frameworks in js/php/python(vuejs/react-js/laravel/flask)

[virtualstreaming]

Hello, my name is Ajaz. I’m a content expert from New York. I’m interested in different blogs content and strategy. I’m excited to show all of you my new work which is on how to Migrate TV Apps.
I would love if anyone suggest me something.

[areeba]

Hello everyone! I’m Areeba Aziz, a final year undergraduate student studying Software Engineering (B.Eng) at McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario, Canada), with expected graduation December 2022. I’ve interned at AWS, Amazon, Arcturus Networks Inc., and Checkout 51, mostly did backend work, as well as React frontend, cloud (AWS) infrastructure, and hands-on work with embedded systems and computer networking (TCP/IP, VoIP).

I am very passionate about the topic of user data privacy and users being able to own and control their own data on the Web.

Last fall, for a school project I thought of building a messaging app where users could control where/how their data is stored. Users could either choose from predefined storage infrastructure options, or build their own as long as they expose their server over HTTP and implement our API to send/receive data. It was a similar concept as Solid Pods but I hadn’t discovered the Solid project yet. This idea seemed too complex for a short-term school project so we didn’t move forward with it.

In the meantime I continued thinking about the idea and started deviating from just a messaging app to the way data is handled over the Web in general. I wanted to separate data from applications, and give full control of data to users. I thought that this would be a big project as we’d probably have to change how data is handled over the Web by changing the underlying specifications and protocols.

About a month ago I came across a podcast episode about “Web 3”. I’d never heard of the term before, and I was so happy that people were trying to solve the same problem! “Web 3” wasn’t the same as the type of solution I was thinking of; I never thought of using a blockchain to solve this problem, and I honestly was curious why this community settled on using blockchain. At the time, I thought “web 3” was just a generic term for a next generation Web that aims to give users ownership and control of their own data, so I had an open mind and thought that maybe we can change the solution from using blockchain; I especially didn’t like the environmental impacts of a potential next-gen web built on a blockchain.

Then I came across Stephen Deihl’s website and I loved reading his blog. In this post he referred to the Solid project’s website, and this is how I discovered the Solid project and Inrupt. I am so glad that this project exists and the solution that this team thought of was a change to the Web’s specification, which makes a lot of sense.

I strongly believe in the vision of Inrupt and the Solid project, and I’m rooting for its success. I’m very glad I came across this community, otherwise I’d have been spending years trying to design the same thing from scratch on my own, definitely with little success!! I’m very excited to be following the Solid project and hopefully can develop Solid apps and find a way to participate in/contribute to the community.

[DamienQ]

Hello!
My name is Damien. I am French but living in Belgium.
Ironically, my past years have been dealing with big ad-tech companies as a start-up growth manager. Partly due to new regulations (GDPR in EU), as handling customer data in my day to day, I have been witnessing the growing interests in data sovereignty among data subjects. I feel people are much more mature around data concepts than a few years ago… to such an extent they start thinking how they could better value it. For that reason, I have been closely following the trend around data unions over the last 2 years. I definitely love this topic! Users gaining control on his data instead of letting it exploited by big companies and excluded from any value sharing. At the moment, most projects are blockchain based such as streamr and fail at offering a real added value for the end users the data sharing technologies are increasingly settling down. This is in that context I have come accros solid project a few months ago. Solid really caught my attention as it looks like solving a pain point I was struggling with when looking at data unions. With data pods, users are really in control on their data, they can precisely see it living in their pod and decide to move it wherever/whenever they want. Despite the current data unions’ narrative is similar (at least the blockchain-based ones), users only allow their data being used by other parties for analytical or ML training purposes with some key benefits though as it is a privacy-preserving and financially rewarding process. I see a potential for Solid pods being an intermediate layer between users and data unions allowing a real control on data. Beyond data monetization in unions, Solid could also reshape how marketing is operated today with users transparently and deliberately sharing some of their information to data controllers for a better experience.
I am currently looking at how I could store some of my key datasets on my pod (bank, health, browser behavior, home IoT, etc…) and see what I could with that
Happy to join the solid community and if the above rings a bell to you, don’t hesitate to pm me!

[lecoqlibre]

Hi everyone,

I’m Maxime from France, working as an independent research engineer and I’ve just been recruited by INRIA (Wimmics Team) to work on Searching and querying distributed data in a Solid ecosystem.

I’m leading and developing Mycelium since 2019, a SOLID based free software suite of tools for farmers, based on the Data Food Consortium ontology on which I contribute also. This project aims to help farmers with interoperable free and open source software.

I’m also the coordinator and maintainer for the DIYseeds project, a series of educational films on seed production. We already produced 40 short films about common vegetable seed production. It’s currently released into 9 languages under the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. 7 other languages are being added on our translation platform.

I contribute to the Virtual-Assembly and to Artifaille, a french CHATONS (alternative free web services hoster).

I’m also a little farmer in the Orne (61) producing apples and pears, apple juice and cider within a collective project we started last year. I’m planning to start producing seeds next year. We bought 7 ha with 1 ha of orchard, 1.5 ha of forest and the rest of grassland. Our plan is to plant many trees and plants, make new ponds, install beehives and so on to increase biodiversity and experiment autonomous living and resilience.

I like to play music, various instrument, I released an auto-produced album in the past.

I’m pleased to join you and wish I can contribute to SOLID

PS: as a new user I was limited to only 2 links, contact me if you want more infromation.

[marc-va]

Hello ye all! I’ve been around for a while but was just following and reading. Lately I’ve been starting to actually build upon Solid and I’m on my personal Solid Quest

I work at the Dutch Landadministration Office (Kadaster) where I’m a Tech Innovator and Solution Architect. I’m very interested in the infrastructure to come in which citizens should have their rights by governing their data and still have governmental services being able to their part of society. I assume this has to improve from the current state towards a more private and yet automated world and I would like to contribute to this by improving the government from the inside out.

I’m a big fan of Open Source Software, Public Code. I’m a developer as well as an architect and I’m very impressed and fond of Event Sourcing (and CQRS). I think this pattern provides many solutions to current issue mainly because it addresses different business concepts which in general are put out of scope; we mainly focus on the current state of a system and not its transitions. Well, I’ll stop here about this subject otherwise …

Happy to attribute my part to the community and the Solid ecosystem!

Cheers, Marc

[wahed]

Hello My name is Wahed. I am an undergraduate software engineering student. I am very passionate about Solid Pod. I’m thrilled to be following the Solid project and am hoping that I will be able to create Solid apps and contribute to the community.

Currently, I am trying to build a Solid Pod based app. I would love to be part of this family. This is going to be exciting

[Carlos]

Hello everyone,

I’m Carlos from Spain, I’m a graphic designer with knowledge in UX Design tools.
I would like to start working with Solid, but I am not a programmer. If any developer needs graphic support I would like to be contacted. We can practice something at no cost.

Regards