Attending the 4th Solid Symposium

This year, I am very much looking forward to attending the Symposium, given my revived enthusiasm for Solid. Also, I'll get to meet some people I've never met in person before, like Angelo and Jeff. As well as meeting with others I've already met. Even Tim will be there!

This time, I'm not giving any talks, though. But I've been part of the Programme Committee, so I've been eyeing the talks coming through. I'll also join the second day of the Solid Hackathon, and I'll be sure to show up for the drinks on the 29th at the Mikkeller Brewpub. All in all, it should be a fun couple of days!

However, this turned out to coincide with the start of my job hunt, because I am once again looking for a job. You would think it's a good thing to attend a tech conference whilst looking for a job... But I haven't had much success finding a job related to Solid in the past, and I don't have any reason to believe that it'll be different this time.

The truth is that, when it comes to my career, I haven't been in the best place for the last couple of years. I'm starting to believe that leaving Moodle was a mistake 😅. But the reality is that I wasn't completely happy there either, as I explained in that blog post. So I suppose I'll have to continue struggling 🤷. To be fair, it took me almost 2 years (and 3 applications) to get a job at Moodle. Maybe I just haven't been patient enough, and certainly I haven't dedicated as much time to job seeking as I should have. I'm fortunate enough to have savings that will last me a few months, so this time I'll try to enjoy the downtime, and hopefully my next job will be more rewarding.

And that's it for this year's Symposium!

I really enjoyed this year's gathering, and even though I didn't give any presentations, I think it was my favourite Symposium so far :D. In part because we had more people from the community showing up than ever before, but I also enjoyed the conversations a lot, and we touched on some topics that I think are very important (more on that later).

The day before the conference I joined the Hackathon, as I mentioned in my previous update. What I didn't mention is that I would be one of the judges :). Most of the participants were new to Solid, but I was surprised by how well they understood Solid with only 2 days of practice. That proves what I've always said, Solid isn't really that hard.

The next day, the conference kicked off with Nigel Shadbolt's keynote. It was my first time hearing him speak, and I have to say I really enjoyed his talk and vision on Solid. We also had a keynote by Virginia Balseiro about dokieli which I also enjoyed. They announced they're launching a startup, I hope it works out for them because I really like their project!

Throughout the rest of the conference, there were also a couple other talks I enjoyed (I'm a big fan of Muze's work). But the best session was, without a doubt, Angelo and Timea's From Apps to Autonomy: Operating Systems for True Data Ownership. Their talk perfectly encapsulated what Solid should be, and Angelo's concept of 5 Levels of Data Ownership is brilliant, I'm sure I'll be referencing it in the future. And the work Timea has been doing on SolidOS is also impressing, I'm really looking forward to see how the project continues to improve.

We also had the chance to organize ourselves using a map built on Solid, which Angelo created to organize his own trip; but augmented with location sharing and ACL permissions when he decided to share it with others. It was a great way to see how Solid can already be used in practice, today, to solve real world problems. Keep an eye on the Practical Solid channel to learn more about this experiment.

I've been thinking about the conversations I've had these last couple of days, and the ideas that have been shared in various presentations. I would say I've come up with 2 main takeaways from the conference.

The first takeaway is that, unfortunately, some people don't seem to care about interoperability as much as I do :(. Let me explain. Many of the demos I saw throughout the conference showed what is, to me, one of the worst anti-patterns in Solid Applications: storing data in .json files 😱. I have discussed this ad nauseam in the Solid Forum, but I was very disappointed to see it happening at the Symposium as well. Furthermore, it seems like the work going on with LWS is gearing towards making RDF support optional, which would be catastrophic in my opinion. I guess everyone is entitled to their opinion, but I honestly think that Solid without interoperability is pointless. One of the core tenets of Solid is to decouple data from applications, but as Angelo said in his presentation, "What is it worth if the data lives in your Pod, but you can’t do anything with it outside of apps?".

The second takeaway, or rather reflection, is about sustainability. I have also talked about Solid Business Models before, and I don't think my opinion has changed much since. But given my recent conversations, I have some more things to say.

First of all, I do believe that a business based on Solid can be sustainable if the protocol reaches a critical mass (we're not there yet), but it'll be very difficult to get a unicorn. Though I have to say, that's not a bug, it's a feature. It's perfectly possible to have a rich ecosystem of small to medium companies, and avoiding centralized power is the point of Solid.

Secondly, I talked about what's keeping the ecosystem from creating startups based on Solid. And I think the role we're lacking the most in the community is entrepreneurs. And yes, I know I call myself and entrepreneur because I have been involved with the startup ecosystem for a while. But the honest truth is that I'm not an entrepreneur, I'm a developer (at most, I'm a failed entrepreneur 😅). During my trips to and from the conference, I was listening to a podcast about Software Brain, and I think it perfectly encapsulates why we're struggling to get Solid to work. Most people in the community get Solid, and see their value. But society at large doesn't, in fact most people don't even care about software that much. But people does care about having control on their life, and everyone's heard some horror stories about privacy or algorithmic manipulation. So we need to bridge the gap between these two views of the world, and I think the only ones who can do that are real entrepreneurs (whatever that means).

Anyhow, that's it from me! Again, I really enjoyed this year's Symposium and I'm looking forward to keep working with Solid myself :).

As soon as I'm done publishing this, I'm heading out to spend the day in London with my partner. We've made some bookings to visit the Sherlock Holmes museum (at 221b Baker Street!) and have an Afternoon Tea. It should be fun!