Congratulations to ODI on securing the grant for Solid!
Several of the grant’s goals (education, cataloging, app development, onboarding, social-good use-cases…) overlap with existing and potential community efforts. Could you please share the plans for the grant distribution?
Specifically, how can community stakeholders and independent developers contribute to and be supported by this grant? A transparent breakdown of allocations for staff, community or independent initiatives, and infrastructure would be very helpful.
edit: The grant has been announced on the last (September 2025) Solid World. I’ll share a link to an announcement or recording when available. Thanks @noeldemartin for pointing out that this information is missing here.
This is response is answering the questions here and on the solid-odi-matrix.
There is no written announcement - the slides from Solid World are public and have a breakdown of the different areas of work we are pursuing. There will also be a recording of Solid World posted by next week. We will be providing regular updates - aiming for a monthly cadence - on our work throughout the grant on this forum, and the matrix channels.
The value of the grant is USD 3M - this was disclosed in Solid World July. It is important to highlight, that even though the grant is specifically to work on Solid - the funds were obtained using the ODI’s existing relationships with philanthropy, and the ODI’s own brand and reputation supported the securing of the grant.
We mentioned support for use-cases in Solid World September. This will not be in the form of sub-grants; and is more likely to be in-kind engineering and advocacy support that we provide. This is because the terms of our grant do not allow for sub-grants. We are designing our use-case support framework at the moment. More information will be provided once this is ready.
Over the coming years, community volunteers will benefit from more reliable infrastructure, better documentation, clearer contribution pathways, and stronger institutional support for the work you’re already doing. We’re committed to working with the community to establish governance structures; however, the funding is allocated explicitly for ODI’s stewardship activities, technical infrastructure, and use case development. Our updates to solidproject.org and creation of Solid developer documentation are steps towards this; and the Advisory Committee is in place to ensure that we prioritise our efforts in the best interest of the project.
The funding is enabling us to build a team that can support, listen to and work with the community so we can help volunteers with what they need. The goal is to create an environment where community contributions can have a greater impact, since we cannot provide direct funding to individuals or community projects. The core team consists of the following roles - with a range of 0.5-1.0 FTE across these roles:
Project Lead
A community manager
Senior Developers x2
Front end developer
Delivery Coordinator
Ombuds
IT & DevOps
This funding also enables us to provide systematic support for the Solid codebases that the ODI now stewards - this includes those codebases found at Solid · GitHub . Our engineering team, will support triaging issues, maintaining codebases, and supporting the volunteer community.
It’s great that ODI has funds to proceed with its work related to Solid.
The grant, however, covers multiple items that are currently done by members of the community (outside ODI), or that community can significantly contribute to:
2.2: Advance development of Solid’s core technology stack, including SolidOS, open source server implementations of Solid, and associated developer tools.
2.4: Develop the Linked Web Storage (LWS) Working Group Specification.
2.5: Support and manage contributor and volunteer structures, onboarding at least 200 new contributors through improved contribution pathways.
2.6: Train the next generation of Solid developers by creating a suite of training materials with at least 7 modules, onboarding guides, and exercises accessible via solidproject.org.
3.1: Conduct a landscape review of the Solid community and develop a comprehensive catalogue of people, organisations, and projects associated with Solid.
3.4: Catalyse a minimum of 6 use case pilots (2 per year), with at least 3 sectors represented (e.g., health, volunteering, public services) to demonstrate Solid’s potential in these areas.
3.6: Cultivate and grow the open-source community around Solid by coordinating 12 global events (e.g. Solid World), and supporting active community management and engagement.
3.8: Develop and disseminate communications and advocacy materials to highlight each use case and other projects from across the Solid community.
It’s not clear how ODI intends to relate to them.
Has ODI asked the stakeholders in these efforts about applying with these efforts, and that the funds won’t be shared with them? How can we ensure that these people will continue being empowered to do their work?
If ODI is going to seek follow-up grants, can you commit to a certain portion (say multiple tens of percent) of the raised total to go to these community efforts, and directly benefit the creators?
A team physically based in London is not inclusive to a global project, as it excludes everyone who is not able to relocate for work. Can you commit to setting up a remote team that can better represent a global community of people passionate about Solid?
Has ODI considered other legal ways to share the resources? Think contracts, allowances…
Can you clarify where we can follow the distribution of the grant (e.g. transparent accounting)?
