Hello and welcome to another edition of This Month in Solid!

Solid is a set of open specifications, built on existing open standards, that describes how to build applications in such a way that users can conveniently switch between data storage providers and application providers and take the data generated along.

This is a monthly summary of Solid progress.

Want something mentioned? Contact the Solid Manager at info@solidproject.org. This Month in Solid is openly developed on GitHub. If you find any errors in this month’s issue please submit a pull request.

Updates

Events

05 November 2020 – This month in Solid, we had a lot of movement in the community and got to hear about some of those activities in detail during November’s Solid World. Our theme for the month was to learn how Solid is delivered at a national scale, focusing on Belgium. But first, we heard a few updates from around the ecosystem.

Recently, there was a change in the Solid Community Pod server. During Solid World, Tim Berners-Lee confirmed that the service is back up and running at solidcommunity.net. There are a few members in the Solid community to thank for helping with this: Justin Bingham, Jackson Morgan, Jeff Zucker, Alain Bourgeois, Eric Prud’hommeaux, and Michiel de Jong.

As usual, Ruben Verborgh shared a progress update on the Community Solid Server, focusing on impressive new database flexibility. The recording for the full demo is on the Solid World Vimeo account. And Osmar (Oz) Olivo gave a preview of big news about Inrupt’s roadmap for bringing Solid to developers and organizations. You can keep up with the latest on Inrupt’s blog.

Following a major announcement last month from the Minister President of Flanders about the government’s embrace of Solid, both of our guest presenters came from that region.

Our first presenter for November’s Solid World was Frédéric Hennequin, who is the Solution Architecture for My Citizen Profile and the Webplatform program of Information Agency of Flanders. We got to see a demo video of how your pod (or profile) would work, from logging into your account, gathering banking information, and using autofill from various accounts on the vlandeer.be website. Learning of the versatility of how much can be done with Solid was very exciting to see, and Flanders has plans to add even more.

Our final presenter was Pieter Heyvaert, the Development Lead and Developer Advocate at Ghent University - IDLab, imec. He discussed the creation of a job application service for those with dyslexia or dyscalculia. The frontend is easy to use and understand by giving the user various ways to upload or input their information and resume by audio, video, or text in addition to a reader option. Lastly, he explained why they are using Solid on the backend, and how data flows are architected.

Register for Solid World December here, and keep an eye out for agenda updates over the coming weeks.

Job Openings

  • Digita is hiring a Full Stack Developer and a Tech Leader. Email tom@digita.ai for more information.
  • Contact Inrupt careers
  • O Team is recruiting a ETL (Extract Transform Load) Engineer, a Linked Data Ontology Designer, and a JavaScript Developer. Email jobs@o.team for more information.

Update from the Specification Editors

This Month in Solid