Hello all, I’m Michael.
Jeff Z. recommended that I introduce myself to you here on the forum. I’m someone who is following solid and taken an interest in the Dataist movement.
I will be the first to admit to you I’m 100% clueless to all things dev and programming, but I’m doing what I can to educate myself and be a part of the community.
I’m a complete NeWb and I don’t know anything yet but I’m working hard to educate myself and learn things.
I hope I can be accepted even though I’m not a dev or programmer.
I look forward to learning and hope I can bring value to the community. 
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I’m Timothy Horton, just an observer trying to understand the solution.
I am concerned by the complexity that is emerging in Solid, and wonder if there is a simpler solution, i.e. create a data coop (solve the data ownership problem with ownership, not technology):
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Solid Community,
I’m Jim Schoening, Computer Engineer with the U.S. Army. I have a team of 6 part-time software developers and ontologists preparing to submit (in 2-3 weeks) some open source capabilities that focus on data integration for the individual, which should be a good complement to the Solid platform.
Bob Ganger, CUBRC, Inc., my technical lead, will introduce himself shortly, post our contributions, and lead our team in providing tech support.
Jim Schoening
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Greetings,
My name is Bob Ganger from CUBRC, Inc. and I work for Jim Schoening and his team on data integration solutions using the Common Core Ontology. See our recent topic regarding a prototype we put together using the Common Core Ontology and a Solid Pod. We’re hoping to get some good feedback from the community on our ideas and approach. Thanks.
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Welcome to Solid! Most Solid apps use a Solid backend and a Javascript frontend so that simplifies your stack decisions somewhat if you’re thinking of developing in Solid. Something that article glossed over is Javascript build tools - webpack, browserify, yeoman, etc. Each of them has been used in one Solid app or another,
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I’m Dmitri and last 20+ years I spent developing backend applications (mostly with Java).
My last project is https://remote4me.com/ - an aggregator for remote jobs
I would like to extend remote4me and to allow candidates to provide anonymous feedback about companies and about the interviews. On the other hand - I do not want to store personal data in remote4me. Probably I could use Solid for this.
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Hello everyone! I’m Michael McCallister, and I’m a technical writer and journalist.
Right now, I’m working on an article for LinuxJournal.com on Solid apps and what is possible to do with Solid Pods today. If you’re a user of one or more Solid apps, I’d love to connect with you: Write me at michael@michaelmccallister.com.
I’ve been interested in decentralized web tech for several years, and want to see millions of ordinary people get comfortable with Solid.
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Hi All,
I’m HuMont - an MSc student in Advanced CompSci with a fascination for the decentralised web and data privacy/portability/interoperability.
I’ve been lurking around the solid world for a while, and for my MSc project i’m writing a Java implementation of the Node-Solid-Server (read: i’ll probably be pestering the forums for advice on protocol implementation incessantly).
Looking forward to contributing!
HuMont
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Hello everybody !
I’m Benoit Alessandroni, aka Balessan almost everywhere on the WEB. I have been a WEB developer for 10 years now, and I am both part of the Happy Dev freelancers network (website completely outdated and new release planned during August) and of StartinBlox, a company which aims to develop a web-component based client framework to ease the implementation of distributed web applications.
I already talked to few of you during some calls and everything, and my registration here is part of the way for us to become more and more active in the community, instead of staying silent observer of what is going on 
We are already developing a few WEB applications for our own customers and use-cases, and one of our main target is to stay compliant with the Solid Specification, still being able to deliver our use-cases.
Cheers guys 
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Hello everyone,
My name is Rob - my experience is mainly as a full-stack web/mobile dev and sysadmin for a small private company. I find much interest in everything to do with Solid but most interestingly to me are back-end challenges in providing control over personal data while still having protection, and global availability.
Looking forward to some good discussions on here and understanding other points of view…
Thank you,
Rob
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@tjhorton - This is kind of along the lines of my thinking where I find it a great challenge to give people absolute control over their data while still having the data protection and availability we have in most systems today.
I live in the States and if I want to give access to my data to someone over in India, optimally, my data would be replicated over on a server closer to the user. I see some big barriers if I am to truly have control over the data. Encryption is great for privacy, but from a data-protection and availability standpoint, you are still at the mercy of who controls the infrastructure.
A consumer cooperative that allows owners to spin up Solid servers in an Azure/AWS-like environment is an interesting idea. I wonder how you could possibly organize and crowd-fund the work, infrastructure, and maintenance that would be needed for that - quite the undertaking to become a decentralized Azure…
Hey @rob - I find this an interesting topic as well. Just curious, when you say, “internet co-operation” - do you mean internet infrastructure or digital?
This has been my main interest around the project - how to truly achieve control over personal data holistically, when there are many other fundamental layers that are currently centralized. We have the Data Storage and Transit layers that are totally centralized right now. I could spin up a Solid Server/POD in Azure and get to it over my Verizon connection from home but that doesn’t seem all that decentralized to me - that makes two different companies that both have control in some sense…
Hello from London thanks for the intro @MitziLaszlo
My name is Kartika Tulusan, I love creaeting apps that drive positive change - lately in crowdfunding and financial products. I’m deeply passionate about a fairer & equal world and feel horrified about big data walls & consumer harvesting with no transparency & lack of current commercial models besides advertising/PR.
I’m now working with a group of people on two areas: 1. Making Solid accessible and User friendly - UX/UI 2. Applying Design Thinking to create empathic 2nd generation of apps that serve citizens and society and not reduce us down to consumers. 3. Creating meaningful personal financial products.
I’m more than excited about the impact Solid will have on us.
Thank you, Kartika
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Hey, just a friendly reminder: please create a new thread if you want to discuss specific topics. This thread is for introductions only, so please don’t go off-topic.
If you do find users in this thread you would like to invite to your discussion, I suggest you mention them in that thread and refer to relevant posts there 
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Hi everyone im martin drummond… yes i dont capitalize or use commas or anything like that so youll just have to get used to it if you want to read my stuff… on the other hand i type like this like a speed demon… which is good because i dont have a lot of time. I grew up in the sf bay area and lebanon england saudi and indonesia… i started programming after i created my oun accounts on their multi user system at stanford univ… i think they had a dec… with lots of tape drives… you could see it through a big window… later i took pl1, assembly, operating systems for the ibm 360-370, fortran… at hunter college in nyc… after that basic on an apple 2e at university of st thomas in houston where we also had a prime mainframe… i also did data backup on a prime at my job. i got into programming seriously around 85 when i bought an amiga which had amiga basic which was a microsoft port that took advantage of the amigas color graphics and stereo sound… it could do voice synthisis too so i immediately wrote convo which is available free on gethub and is a project im pushing trying to get people to do the things i dont have time for like making it seemlessle listen and respond with voice recog… its always been able to talk via one of the free text to speech packages… but i want it to use microsoft voice recognition… anyway ive taught myself c++ but im not fluent and dont use it much… html… if familiar with linux and of course unix from my old days… and ive messed around with a lot of the most powerful and used languages… i love ai… as far as im concerned every time you run a programming language you are creating it… but figuring out how to do that in more sophisticated ways and of course getting a computer to think (for itself is a kind of strange thing to say since youre teaching it how to do that but isnt that the way all things become intelligent?) is a thing i enjoy immencely… i mostly program to make my life easier… i programmed an amazing data base handler way back when… 80s… i ran into what was it??? db1 and 2… did they actually name it that?? i think so… i didnt like it… it was the height of data base programming but it was clunky and didnt have a good gui… im sure they do now but im still planning on going back and finishing a new version of mine… its called the datamaster and yeah im sure plenty of people have taken the name… Anyway i love this stuff… i just wrote a program the other day to pull text i dont like out of a text file because when ever i cut and paste a wikipage into a text file and run it through a text to speech program so i can listen to it when i jog or something it has all this annoying crap in it… the programs pretty simple … you make a file with all the text you want removed and it removes it from the wiki pasted text… simple but effective… mainly i use it to get rid of things like [1]… its a pain to do i manually… so im still programming… ive been programming in qb64 for years now… quickbasic before that and amigabasic as i said before that. i do lots of other things besides mess with computers and program… i have my oun news channel on youtube which i promote mainly through facebook… that is my job now more or less since i retired… im a musician and you can find my music on you tube… look for the no names… songs like eco terrorist… keep wondering… hey hey hey hey… rock on… my accounts are majorheadrush or progressive news… thats all i have time for now peace out!
Hey @megoth - sorry, you’re right, didn’t mean to clutter up the thread - will start one…
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Hi Everyone!
This is all new to me. I’m looking forward to learning more about Solid and how to use it.
NF
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Hi everyone. I am new to this forum. How are you? 
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I have forgotten to introduce myself. So here my delayed introduction:
Hi, I am Frank - I call myself Joytag on the web because I feel, it sounds more friendly.
I always was interested in all topics related to programming, bút it was the internet (tcp/ip) and so all possiblities of server-client communications that get me really hooked up.
I used to develop desktop apps (with Java and the Eclipse infrastructure) that used the internet for data exchange, but now the web has grown to a good platform (through good standards and browsers) I am switching to Node.js for server side and MongoDB/Mongoose for data storage and a appropriate MVC framework for the browser client. Personally I prefer Ember before Angular.
It was good luck that led me to Solid and the POD project. I think making all sorts of content and relations available via something like RDF is a necessary step for the further development of the web, and the approach to decentralize instead of using great portals with big databases is very welcome.
I am looking forward to having a good time with you here. Shall we inspire each other
P.S.: I almost forgot to mention, I am very very interested in philosophy too. Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead are my favorites at the time. I also like the pragmatic school (William James, Mead, John Dewey).
So if you are in need for someone to philosophize with - I am ready for everything!
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