Solid Amsterdam – 2nd Session Summary

On January 30th, the second Solid Amsterdam Meetup was organized by Jeroen van Beele at the VU in Amsterdam with the support of Solid, PLDN, Triply and the VU. After a number of more technical Solid sessions, we wanted to present and discuss possible business models and the governance aspects of Solid with the 30 participants. In this summary we will describe the highlights of this Solid Meetup.

Unfortunately we only have two partial videos of two presentations due to technical problems with Periscope live streaming on Twitter. But the good news is that we are working on next Solid Meetups in collaboration with Solid Utrecht and our Solid network in Belgium.

Table of Contents

• Tom Haegemans – Capturing the value of Solid: Actors, business models and lessons learned (slides & video)
• Deike Schulz – Front end user commitment as a critical success factor for Solid: Don't make me think? (slides)
• Hay Kranen – How to create a linked data community in only nineteen years (slides & video)
• Özcan Şeker – Lessons learned while building the PLDN linked beer app using Solid (slides & Solid app)
  
  

Photo impression: 2nd Solid Amsterdam Meetup

Tom Haegemans – Capturing the value of Solid: Actors, business models and lessons learned

The first speaker Tom Haegemans, a professor at the KU Leuven and also co-founder of the R&D and Marketing company Digita, which is also a Solid startup company with a 500 k€ funding, presented us some Solid lessons learned that they have collected from the feedback they got from a number of enterprises that they have worked with.

First, for persons and organizations, it is more easy to understand what Solid is about when it is expressed in terms they are already familiar with, like Solid is about your personal data web (a combination of personal data and the world wide web) and your data pod is your personal data vault (or your virtual data vault), where your personal data is stored in a safe and secure way (it’s a vault).

Second, Solid gives you ultimate data portability, where you can move your data from one pod provider to another pod provider without losing any data. And with Solid you can also share your data with other persons and organizations if you want to do that, but you don’t have to do that. You are in control yourself of what you share. It just supports the idea of more easy data sharing.

You can use Solid at different scales, like internally at a small scale within a company or at a larger scale in a community or globally in the World Wide Web. When you start small and have the semantic standardization of your data in place then it is more easy to scale up and use and share your data with more persons and organizations in communities or globally in the World Wide Web, where we will have an adoption of Solid at internet scale. But, we don’t expect that it will be feasible that you can always link to the data source on the web and that no copies of personal data are needed anymore. In some cases it might be needed to work with copies given e.g. certain contracts (but with much less data duplication).

Solid gives you, in terms of functionality and features, a single interface to your data and Solid makes it also much easier to share your data with your consent (with your permission). But consent is not enough, you must also look at the contextual intergrity of your data and therefore you must be able to detect whether your data is used in appropriate and socially accepted information flows (e.g. from your doctor to a hospital when this is needed) and when this is not the case that you can log or report that. And we also need trusted authorities that can verify and approve your online identity via your WebID and and your other identity attributes (e.g. via certificates) that you really are the right person in an information flow.

We also see that both Solid and Blockchain are using the concept of Self Sovereign Identity (SSI). SSI means that a person or organization can manage the attributes that make up their identity and can control access to those attributes when required in an information flow. But the Solid variant is much simpler and based on proven web technology. It would be interesting to investigate further how Blockchain SSI can complement Solid SSI given the fact that Solid and Blockchain are overlapping and complementary technologies.

Key life events are events that change your personal data, like you move house, you mary, you die, etc. It would be nice when it would be sufficient to change the data in your data pod then, but unfortunately it is more difficult than that. Different organizations, like telco’s, banks, supermarkets, etc. have different processes to handle key life events and the required data updates must be aligned to those different processes. But, with Solid you can have less data duplication and more efficient processes to handle different key life events.

With Solid it is very important that you not only create value with data, but that you also try to capture value with data and don’t give away everything for free. With Solid this is not that easy, since Solid supports the idea of free open markets with no monopolies (vertical disintegration), no lock-ins and less dependencies. This is very different from the traditional business models and we are in the process of finding out how this can work best for Solid. But, in the second part of his presentation Tom showed us the 6 different actors he is seeing in the total Solid ecosystem, like consumer and enterprise clients, identity and pod providers and app builders and operators (ventures), and for each actor he showed us the possible value propositions and revenue streams. Please check Tom’s presentation for the full details of all actor descriptions.

Deike Schulz – Front end user commitment as a critical success factor for Solid: Don't make me think?

The second speaker confronted us with two distinct views. One about communication in general, applied to the Solid case. And one from her personal experience being new to Solid. Both views are captured in her slides.

First view. Schulz explained two important usabilty concerns that have to be addressed thoroughly. First there is the problem of lock-in. The reason of being for Solid is the current lock-in at platforms like facebook and google. But how will Solid revert this dystopia? And how can we be sure that Solid isn't the next lock-in? Can the Solid community convince the public that this is indeed what Solid does: free you from lock-in? And there is one question that comes before these questions: Do we have a problem? What do you mean by lock-in? The other point is intimately connected to the first: in general people are reluctant to switch. We need to have a really good case otherwise people will not switch, this is the meaning of the title of her talk: Don't make me think. People only want to think about this whole new setup of WebID's and Pods if you offer them real value with these gadgets. And this surely is more than just of technical nature.

Second view. Schulz' personal experience while mastering Solid was very instructive. She had a hard time figuring out what Solid was about and why we would like to use it. As her lectorate evolves around meaningful communication, she gave an indepth application of the Schramm model of meaningful communication to our Solid case in four concrete questions (see slide 13).

1. How to overcome lock-in of users and what are current switching costs?
2. How to develop a dominant design or standard?
3. What is unique about Solid?
4. What is the exact value proposition of Solid and Solid apps?
   
   

Finally she drew our attention to the 5th international conference on new business models (https://www.nbmconference.eu/) which might well be very instructive for entrepreneurs aiming at marketing Solid-apps.

Hay Kranen – How to create a linked data community in only nineteen years

The third speaker, Hay Kranen, has been involved in the Wikipedia community for more than 15 years in different roles and he showed us what ideas and concepts have been crucial for Wikipedia to become a very active worldwide community that produces high quality content that everybody can easily find and read on the internet or via the Wikipedia app.

Wikipedia was founded in 2001 and is a very impressive global community when you look at some of Wikipedia’s key figures: in almost 20 years more than 50 million articles were written in 300 different languages, everyday 100.000 new articles are created and half a billion pages are viewed. This means that Wikipedia is in the top 5 online resources that people use when they are looking for information on the internet (in the same ‘league’ as Google, Toutube and Facebook). And Wikipedia achieves this via small donations, with less than 500 paid employees (and many volunteers) while having no commercial ads or trackers on the Wikipedia pages (it’s just information).

Every month 70.000 persons make on average 5 edits or more. And to get an impression of the actual dynamics of the creation process of new Wikipedia articles, you can view the online visualization of this process on the Listen to Wikipedia website. And of course, it is possible to add incorrect and/or inappropriate information on Wikipedia, but we also see that Wikipedia is using Elinor Ostrom’s 8 rules for managing the commons and these rules form the basis for a constructive and positive collaboration environment, also for local Wikipedia communities, where editors and reviewers have several processes in place to create high quality content and to detect incorrect and inappropriate content. And this global success has been awarded with several prizes, like the Erasmus prize in 2005. And the general experience with Wikipedia is very positive. For Solid it is very interesting to find out what we can learn from Wikipedia when we take the next steps in creating the global Solid movement, community and ecosystem.

Özcan Şeker – Lessons learned while building the PLDN linked beer app using Solid

The last speaker Özcan Şeker, a student from Saxion University of Applied Sciences, has worked on several Solid and Linked Data assignments at the Dutch Cadastre, Land Registry and Mapping Agency (in short the Kadaster) as part of an internship. Özcan presented us his lessons learned from his Solid app development activities for a Social Linked Beer app. This app is a web application with Untappd-alike functionality, where beer drinkers can check-in and review beers and can directly link to friends or within groups to share beer reviews.

The Social Linked Beer app is a stable demonstrator now that can be used to explain how a Solid app works and how your personal data is stored in your data pod. Your personal beer data is separated from your Solid app and is under your control. And you can also see in your data pod how new data is linked to already stored data in a uniform way and how other persons can add data to your pod when they e.g. add likes to your reviews (Likes were implemented using the Activity Vocabulary as was suggested to us via the Solid App Development chat rooms). Solid apps give you the means to organize the personal data in your data pod in a very flexible, easy extensible and secure way.

But storing all your personal data in one data pod might also make this data storage a bit more vulnerable (it can become a single point of failure). But, in practice, you can have more than one data pod for different purposes and spread the risks of possible failure. We also see that with the current version of data pods, that there is room for improvement for the user friendliness of data pods. The user interaction and experience can be made more intuitive for all the users that would like to use Solid data pods. And we would also like to see that more Solid developers in the Netherlands, in Belgium and worldwide become involved to develop new Solid apps.

Özcan’s development activities for the Social Linked Beer app ended February 1st, but we are looking whether we can start up a phase 2 for this Solid app. This can mean that another Solid developer or a team of Solid developers add new functionality to the existing Social Linked Beer app or that they use this app as a source of inspiration to develop another interoperable Social Linked Beer that can work with the data in the data pods of the users that have used the first Social Linked Beer app. You can contact Pieter van Everdingen, the community manager of PLDN, via info@pldn.nl, when you are interested to participate in a phase 2 for the Social Linked Beer app.

The Social Linked Beer app and its source code can be found via:

• https://ozcanseker.github.io/Social-linked-beer/ (web app)
  
• https://github.com/ozcanseker/Social-linked-beer (source code)
  
  
  
  

Social Linked Data(Solid) is een webdecentralisatieproject geleid door Tim Berners-Lee, de uitvinder van het World Wide Web, ontwikkeld in samenwerking met het Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Het project 'heeft als doel de manier waarop webapplicaties tegenwoordig werken radicaal te veranderen, wat resulteert in echt data-eigendom en verbeterde privacy' door een platform te ontwikkelen voor gekoppelde datatoepassingen die volledig gedecentraliseerd zijn en volledig onder controle van gebruikers in plaats van gecontroleerd. door andere entiteiten.

Platform Linked Data Nederland (PLDN)

Personal Online Data Stores (PODS) of Personal Online Data Storage Containers zijn beveiligde online opslagplaatsen voor persoonlijke gegevens waar apps toegang tot kunnen hebben als zij daarvoor geautoriseerd zijn.

Weergave van een feit, begrip of aanwijzing, geschikt voor overdracht, interpretatie of verwerking door een persoon of apparaat

Het wereldwijde web (www) ook wel met de Engelse term 'world wide web' aangeduid, maar meestal kortweg het web, houdt in:

• een aantal technische afspraken voor het wereldwijd over het internet aanbieden en verbinden van allerhande documenten en computertoepassingen;
• de verzameling documenten en toepassingen die wereldwijd volgens dit systeem over het internet worden aangeboden.

Personal Operational Data Stores (Pods)

Personal Online Data Stores (PODS) of Personal Online Data Storage Containers zijn beveiligde online opslagplaatsen voor persoonlijke gegevens waar apps toegang tot kunnen hebben als zij daarvoor geautoriseerd zijn.

De Social Linked Beer app is een Solid app die gebaseerd is op de Solid Linked Bier use case en die gebouwd is door Ozcan Seker, een student van de Saxion Hogeschool, tijdens een stage bij het Kadaster met ondersteuning van PLDN community members (Erwin Folmer, Pieter van Everdingen, Joost Farla en Pano Maria)

Personal Operational Data Stores (Pods)

Personal Online Data Stores (PODS) of Personal Online Data Storage Containers zijn beveiligde online opslagplaatsen voor persoonlijke gegevens waar apps toegang tot kunnen hebben als zij daarvoor geautoriseerd zijn.