SolidOS Team Meeting

# SolidOS Team Meeting * Date: 10.18.2023 18:00 (UTC+2) * Call: [https://meet.jit.si/solid-operating-system](https://meet.jit.si/solid-operating-system) * [Previous meeting link]() * [Next meeting link]() * Chat: [https://gitter.im/solidos/solidos](https://gitter.im/solidos/solidos) * Repository: [https://github.com/solidos/solidos](https://github.com/solidos/solidos) * Meetings home: [https://solidos.solidcommunity.net/public/SolidOS%20team%20meetings/](https://solidos.solidcommunity.net/public/SolidOS%20team%20meetings/) ---- ## Present attendees * Jon, Timea, Jeff, Alain, Noel, Michal, Rui ### Scribes * Jon --- ## Topics ### Round Table #### Alain Question about chat: changes have been made that have caused issues. Problem about immigration from nss to css. (Noel added issues to technical topics) #### Noel Worked on [Ramen](https://ramen.noeldemartin.com), basic application to test pods, will migrate it to [Aerogel](https://aerogel.js.org) framework #### Jeff Would like to start a task force to deal with issues of broadening Solid community #### Jon - Wants to join the task force that Jeff mentioned. - Has been focusing on the documentation, in particular [the github repo](https://github.com/solid-contrib/getting-started). Started creating links to documentation in a POD (using [Penny](https://penny.vincenttunru.com/) which has been helpful with autocompletion of ontology terms). - Has been [talking about the diagram in the forum](https://forum.solidproject.org/t/solid-ecosystem-diagram/6921/4). Some of these conversations seem to be lost, so he's thinking on creating issues to keep track of those. - Jeff: I recommend that you use GitHub discussions, rather than issues, to keep track of those. - Still doing experiments with AI in http://jonwilson.dev (it doesn't seem to be able to read some links properly, but it can read markdown from PodOS). #### Timea - Updated Solid Logic library, created an issue, but got stuck, along with others, on this issue with Chat. Figuring out when can we have a release. - Talking with Jeff about his efforts to grow the community - As the community matures, there is some critical feedback, this is not necessarily a bad thing #### Michal - Is part of Open Hospitality Network, was part of hackathon team - Working on email notifications - Put link in chat - Jeff: working with practitioners, and you are an example of that, could you send me info about what you're doing - It's good to see this community of developers, building apps, - https://sleepy.bike/ is the production (the UI is very basic for now) https://github.com/openhospitalitynetwork/sleepy.bike - https://github.com/openhospitalitynetwork/solid-email-notifications #### Rui - Submitted papers - Discussed with Rahul issues for changing CSS and some apps ### Main topics #### .... ### Technical topics #### Chat #### NSS to CSS Jeff: Ruben submitted [a migration script](https://github.com/RubenVerborgh/NSS2CSS). Meanwhile, ppl are discussing what is solidcommunity.net, what roles, what security promises should it make, what users should it support. The 10K Inrupt bounty was retracted since nobody applied. - Noel: about the question, what is solidcommmunity.net, and when people ask me what server to use I am not sure what to tell them, if it is stable and how useful it is. Michal, in your case you use Solid for 30 people, what pods do you use? - Michal: we do not provide pods, we give them the options that exist (solidweb.me) because it is on CSS and we need it for email notification. NSS does not offering this. - Noel: a friend of mine is also using it, but 2 weeks ago it stopped working, had a CORS issue or so, and my friend he did not know who to talk with. The thing has my data but I do not know who to talk to. At that time it was fine but because he did not have improtant data on it. Solid needs a more serious pod providers, there are some like GraphMetrix, but it is not for consumers. We need to be aware of it. - Jeff: there is the Dutch company, Athumi or something like that, it is a data provider agency. An institutional provider of pods - Timea: it is only for Flanders - Noel: that only works with their applciation. t - Timea: to get a webid on that, you have to be a Flanders citizen, and the apps that work with it have to be provided by them, it's closed environment for security - Noel: if Solid wants to get real this needs to get solved. Ideal would be, if anyone has an account in dropbox or whatever, it would be cool if they could be used as Solid too. I do not have time to dedicate to that but maybe in 2-3 years I could code it. It would be very important for the ecosystem. #### Videos & new comers & misc - Jon: Timea your talk was terrific, I enjoyed it. Noel I also watched too and I might learn Vue to use it. Maybe it would be a good optino for onboarding developers. I liked how you used the cmd tool. - Noel: I did not use the Inrupt SDKs but they are similar. There is one for React, you could look into. What Aerogel is trying to solve is not only Solid but app development. IN general devs have preferences so they will not chnage frameworks. The getting started things should be framework agnostic. - Jon: I only use react because that is how I got my job I can use other tools too if need be. - Noel: a. lot of people have preferences, I would never use React., - Timea: Yes, we need to think about who is learning, and what their preferred tools are, and how to reach them, and maybe in the future, we can extend it to no code tools, maybe also, as Noel was saying, something simple, like, you can drop something in a dropbox type app, and have a solid server - Noel: a good example is [how to use GraphQL](https://www.howtographql.com/). It is a lot of work. - Rui: I remember what my issues where when I started learning Solid: it was related a lot to teh fact that I was not a frontend developer - I did not know what javascript, css is. There were a lot of things to wrap my head around. The blocking was how to persist a login state and why do I need ot do that. How to handle redirects. Afterwards I understood everything. Later I started to learn Vue, first thing was to interact with an existing React app, I could modify it. Than I learned Vue, more ocncepts were intuitive for me. There was still a blocking thing about login. How do I keep the login state accross different pages. I hd discussion on teh forum with Noel back than, in the end I realised I ened to use persistance store. It was simpel but I needed to do it the hard way every time. It is somethign worth improving. I don't know how it can be resolved, but I did a npm lib just for Vue, to keep the login status. - Jeff: it seems more of an issue that the authorization process needs to be made simpler (as opposed to the documentation needing to be made simpler). - Timea: I hasd a similar experience learning it also, but the good news is that it will improve; meanwhile we need to offer the best documentation and examples that we have. Authentication in general is difficult, not just in Solid. It's an advanced topic, but at the same time, every app needs it. I really love, as feedback, what were the difficult parts learning Solid. - Noel: Authorization with oauth is not Solid specific, at the beginning it was hard, but I learned it in other apps, so it was difficult in Solid. The hard part was learning the mindset of how to structure your data. Example, you can't do pagination, like with a task list, when you get the data from a container, you get all the things. I still think we need pagination, but otoh it's just one person, and a single persons data doesn't grow so fast. - Timea: clarification. I think what Noel is getting at about pagination is because of the semantic web, not solid exactly; if you look at the issue of pagination in the semantic web domain, there are people talking about - Rui: I'm the oppostie of Noel, I came with knowledge about linked data and rdf, but not auth. for the paginaiton thing, you could split your data as different documents/files in that container, and use reasoning to make it appear as if it is from the same document. (Rui's note: Thus you can do arbitrary pagination, and reasoning will do everything automatically for you, given that you have defined the rules.) - Timea: We have a lot to learn from semantic web practitioners - Michal: reading a book about RDF helped a lot - Timea: We should create a list of books in our docs - Rui: btw I'm not a semantic web guy, I just learned it related to my research - Michal: For me, the first step in learning is looking how things work under the hood, developer tools and network requests. Books come after. --- This template is based on the [W3C meeting template](https://github.com/solid/specification/blob/main/meetings/template.md) [Code of conduct](https://github.com/solid/process/blob/main/code-of-conduct.md)