# W3C Solid Community Group: Weekly

* Date: 2022-11-23T14:00:00Z
* Call: https://meet.jit.si/solid-cg
* Chat: https://gitter.im/solid/specification
* Repository: https://github.com/solid/specification
* Status: Draft

## Present
* [Sarven Capadisli](https://csarven.ca/#i)
* [Wouter Termont](https://github.com/woutermont)
* [Pierre-Antoine Champin](https://solid.champin.net/pa/profile/card#me)
* Arthur Joppart
* April Daly
* [Henry Story](https://mathstodon.xyz/@bblfish)
* Maxime Lecoq
* [Ted Thibodeau](https://github.com/TallTed)
* [Tiger Wang](https://fosstodon.org/@wxh) (audience)
* elf Pavlik
* Jeff Waters
* Matthias Evering
* Armando Ramos
* Laurens Debackere

---

## Announcements

### Meeting Recordings and Transcripts
* No audio or video recording, or automated transcripts without consent. Meetings are transcribed and made public. If consent is withheld by anyone, recording/retention must not occur.
* Join queue to talk.

### Participation and Code of Conduct
* [Join the W3C Solid Community Group](https://www.w3.org/community/solid/join), [W3C Account Request](http://www.w3.org/accounts/request), [W3C Community Contributor License Agreement](https://www.w3.org/community/about/agreements/cla/)
* [Solid Code of Conduct](https://github.com/solid/process/blob/main/code-of-conduct.md), [Positive Work Environment at W3C: Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct](https://www.w3.org/Consortium/cepc/)
* Operating principle for effective participation is to allow access across disabilities, across country borders, and across time. Feedback on tooling and meeting timing is welcome.
* If this is your first time, welcome! please introduce yourself.

### Scribes
* Wouter Termont
* elf Pavlik

### Introductions
* Maxime Lecoq: Lives in France (Normandy), and works with [Inria](https://www.inria.fr/en). We are working on research and discovery in Solid. Also have a project [mycelium](https://framalistes.org/sympa/info/mycelium-copil): a platform for little farmers to follow activity on the farm.

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## Topics

* SC: Today's topics are intended for awareness and build engagement as opposed to solving technical details here.

### Agenda and Minutes

* SC: Agenda is typically PRd at https://github.com/solid/specification/
* SC: Reviews on the PR are welcome.
* SC: Previous meeting's minutes are at https://github.com/solid/specification/blob/main/meetings/2022-11-16.md and you can always find prior minutes at https://github.com/solid/specification/blob/main/meetings/.
* SC: Please note that unless there is a decision to change the meeting datetime, it is always on UTC time (and daylight savings time is not observed, as it stands).

* SC: Please speak clearly and slowly to help with transcribing.
* SC: Editorial help with transcription is welcome, e.g., where scribe marks `???`, adding links, fixing grammar, or typos. However, do not change or elaborate on earlier transcription, especially what was not explicitly "aired" by the group.

### Solid Protocol Considerations section

(objective of this agenda item?)

URL: http://solidproject.org/ED/protocol#considerations

* SC: An overview about this section and request for comments.
* ...: S
*
*
* hares screen of protocol, but applies to all specs.
* ...: Usually non-normative, in context of particular protocol. We'll use the protocol as a baseline.
* ...: The consideration sections is usually to detail privacy, security, i18n etc. Typically quite close to w3c standards, and reviewed by w3c horizontal groups. It is not intended to be an exhaustive list: illustrations, some things are out of scope.
* ...: In the solid protocol we have: security, privacy, accessibility, i18n, security and privacy, and societal impact. W3C offers a security and [privacy questionaire/review](https://www.w3.org/TR/security-privacy-questionnaire/), with details on what to consider for a spec. E.g. what information might this website expose, to whom and for what purpose. Not everything is useful for each spec; they are tagged. We can take a tag and have the questions listed, not filled in of course. For example, take the section on security and privacy: they could be included in one or more consideration sections. These are important to help the implementers know what they have to take into account in order to incorporate them. For a particular feature, we have to make a call whether it is something for conformance or for consideration. For
* example, what kind of things servers mean when they respond with certain status code. There are also considerations that come directly from other specs (e.g. solid protocol -> authz specs). Example: servers are ??? security. Basically anyone implementing the solid protocol must take into account ???. It is not that we have to go into details of e.g. harassment, etc. in a solid spec, but we can reference to the relevant documents there.
* ...: W3C have a process chart through which specs have to go. [Horizontal Review](https://www.w3.org/2021/Process-20211102/#wide-review)
* ...: We have an [issue](https://github.com/solid/specification/issues/256) to get that for the solid specs.
* ...: Then we have internationalization (i18n) considerations.
* ...: The I18n activity as making sure different languages and encodings are represented. We want to make sure we are conforming to I18n recommendations.
* SC: Social Impact, this is a recent work of W3C TAG, it asks questions if spec has considered something. For example, if it can cause harm.
* ...: I'll pick one example to read it out loud: *What groups of people are excluded from using features of your specification*
* ...: Not all need to be applicable but we should take them into consideration.
* SC: I'll share few more examples ...
* ...: The links are there in the Solid Protocol
* ...: It is not conformance, so one could get away to have conformant implementation without it. As CG we still need to make sure we put out those considerations.
* TBL: What is the objective of the meeting to date. Just talking about importance, look for review of them?
* SC: Some of the topics are to bring awareness, draw attention and get people to contribute. There are issues and PRs where people can follow up.
* Sindhu: I want to talk about doing Use Cases before you finish your specification. To do broad use cases and sit down with the users. I've been working with software for long time. I see that if you don't do use cases with real people, developing software becomes very hard. Solid is something that implementations will be based on. I don't think you are going to get user friendly technology until you take on deep work with users. I think some recommendations are nebulous and users are not. If working with users is not being done I think there is a gap.
* TBL: It is really important to understand use cases, few years ago in MIT group we've done a lot of work on use cases. At protocol level Solid applies to all data, used by any app. Solid Protocol is supposed to be universal. The developers should be able to write any application that they can dream up in the future.
* ...: For SolidOS is a user facing system, solid protocol is developer facing system and got to be universal.
* Sindhu: I'm not trying something critical about anybody's work. The developers are not representative for the majority of the world. I'm myself a minority woman, I work for the US federal government, work with states, I work with technologies to make it work for the people. I sit there and do use cases, I talk with afro-american single women in US. You can't build something if you don't talk with the people.
* TBL: Where do we find your use cases?
* Sindhu: You can talk to me, I don't have them published. I work with mental health services and homeless populations. I try to bring process to the table not the answers.
* SC: We work with use cases, there are various UCR documents published (giving some examples). Sometimes it is hard to requre which use cases are leading to specific requirement.
* Sindhu: I'm reading a process issue, as software developer you always need to work with user facing. We get into a lot of software development, which sometimes is "we have a great idea", how do you hone? it? We need to go and work with a user group. We don't want to end up with 5mln protocols which people don't understand.
* SC: I'd love to follow up on it
* TBL: There is a lot of work going on with use cases. Companies like Inrupt are working with use cases.
* TBL: sharing various examples of various projects using solid
* ...: Solid is more like HTTP which has to be very universal.
* eP: We should schedule it for agenda in 2 weeks
* LD: In Flonders we work a lot with use cases and we build on Solid protocol. I think Sindhu's point is very fair. In our work we take it into account when designing use cases.
* SC: https://solid.github.io/authorization-panel/authorization-ucr/ , https://solid.github.io/notifications-panel/notifications-ucr/

### Forming a W3C Solid Working Group
URL: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-solid/2022Nov/0001.html

* SC: TimBL made an announcement and maybe he can give brief description, maybe Pierre-Antoine can fill in as well.
* TBL: CG was active for long time. All the structure with panels and reviews has been in CG. It will be easier to make progress if we charter a Working Group.
* ...: The crucial thing is the scope of WG, the easy part is that WG can take over the Solid Protocol and everything that server needs to know.
* TBL: https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/diagrams/solid/solid-layers-2022-4.svg
* ...: Since web was introduced, the blue pieces are what people are thinking about web2.0
* ...: Solid adds on top of it authentication and universal API, Solid Protocol is what allows separation of apps from data.
* ...: Solid protocol spec which is at 0.9 which is the lavender color layer. Once you have solid protocol people can write applications. If they agree how they work the applications can interoperate. We've been writing some shapes, each of the purple hexagons is a domain where we take a vocab (e.g. vcard).
* ...: Other examples like health care data will be complicated and will take a really long time.
* ...: The WG should do solid protocol but not applications area.
* SC: I'd like Pierre-Antoine to chime in
* PAC: I'm here with W3C hat on. I'm focusing on all the activity around RDF and Linked Data. I'd like to help with creating WG for solid. I think the limitation that TimBL described makes a lot of sense. We will probably come back to CG with a charter proposal which will need to be discussed and proposed to W3C members.
* TBL: The use cases will trickle down to the purple (the hexagons).