The Solid Together session aims to highlight the various projects around the world that use Solid to serve the greater good in society and app frameworks that support collaboration and decentralisation.
Date: April 24, 2025
Time: 10:00 - 13:00
Venue: DM.1.15, Gorlaeus Building, Einsteinweg 55, 2333 CC Leiden, Netherlands
Jeff Zucker (remote)
Rahul Gupta (remote)
Solid envisions a decentralized web that empowers individuals and communities to move towards an equitable, informed, and interconnected society. Solid Practitioners has emerged as the de-facto group in the Solid Project for people who are putting that vision into practice.
In the spirit of the core themes of Solid Symposium 2025 of cross-community collaboration, international perspective and operational application, we invite the practitioners of Solid around the world who are creating software based on principles of data decentralization, autonomy and interoperability to empower individuals with data and serve the needs of society.
Thank you for yor submissions for this session. This call is now closed!
Submissions for this sessions can be made in any one of the following formats:
All submissions must be in PDF file format and can be submitted as links or attachments via E-mail to the organizers. Please include a short bio for the speakers as well as links to your personal website and/or socials along with your submissions.
If an early decision is required for a submission, such as for visa and travel booking, please contact the organisers directly before the deadlines above.
Speaker: Jeff Zucker (remote)
The purpose of the Solid Catalog is to create and make public a comprehensive listing of people, organizations, products, services, and events useful to people wanting to learn about, use, create, or promote the Solid software ecosystyem. Data will be kept in RDF as described in this repo and can therefore be reused by multiple applications.
Jeff has been a close to full time volunteer with Solid since fall of 2018. Over the years he has created a dozen Solid apps and libraries, contributed to a number of other Solid repositories. He has served as co-author of the WebID Profile specification, moderator of the Solid Forum, moderator and admin of the Solid chat rooms, and founder/faclitator of the Solid Practitioners Group. He previously also served on the Solid Team as a Creator and as a co-chair of the DEI task group. By training, Jeff is as a cultural anthropologist and prior to Solid, worked for many years as a consultant to UNICEF, UNESCO, and four other U.N. agencies as well as to many NGOs involved in climate change, international human rights, multi-cultural education, adult literacy and other social issues. He was an early adopter of the first web and created ten of the first few thousand websites.
Speaker: Hugh Harker (remote)
One of the biggest barriers for people experiencing homelessness is managing the paperwork needed to access services. Our fragmented support systems and reliance on physical documents make it difficult to keep track of what’s required. Even holding onto a government ID can be a challenge. Living on the street often means losing key documents, which blocks access to services and makes it harder to secure housing or even shelter.
PASS was developed with Oregon social workers as a digital wallet, built on the SOLID infrastructure. It allows both social workers and unhoused individuals to securely store and access sensitive documents. By moving paperwork to a digital platform, PASS helps simplify the process and improve access to critical services.
Hugh is the founder of Code for PDX, which is a Code for America Brigade located in Portland Oregon. Code for PDX helps local nonprofits and municipalities improve their services by enhancing their technological footprint.
Speaker: Sébastien Rosset (remote)
ActivityPods is a software for creating Solid Pods that can communicate with each other using the ActivityPub protocol. The first version was released in 2022, with a first application (“Welcome to my Place”) allowing anyone to propose events at home. This app was an immediate success, with 500+ users creating a Pod and meeting each others through the app. Two other applications were then released. Three years later, we’d like to share our thoughts on the recipes we believe made this experiment a success, as well as the things that were more difficult. This will allow us to reflect on the Solid project and where it might be headed.
A web developer for almost 30 years, Sébastien has been interested in web (re)decentralization since 2018, when the ActivityPub protocol was published. For the past 3 years, he has been the lead developer of ActivityPods, an open-source software for creating decentralized social applications based on the Solid and ActivityPub protocols. Today, he is an active contributor to both communities.
Speaker: Michal (remote or possibly onsite)
SolidCouch is a decentralized hospitality exchange built with the Solid protocol, designed to foster genuine, face-to-face connections through hosting and travel. In this talk, I'll demo SolidCouch and explore how decentralized, Solid-based networks can facilitate real-world interactions. We'll also look ahead to how future Solid applications could help form local, collaborative community networks—empowering people to have fun and work together against loneliness and for positive change.
Michal has mostly been an independent Solid application/library developer focused on the social-network aspects of the Solid project. They've been playing with Linked Data since around 2019, and with Solid since 2021. They've been involved in hospitality exchange communities since 2012, first as a member and later as a contributor.
Speaker: Philippe Duchesne
The exploration of various Solid-based use cases has led to the development of the solidbench.dev platform, meant as an integrated personal dashboard where Solid-based apps can be dynamically registered and deployed as plugins. This session will present the platform itself, how domain-specific apps can be developed and deployed in it, and two existing use cases that have been developed using it, related to retail data and web annotations.
Philippe is a software engineer with 25 years of experience working with data on the web. He has been involved in web standards design and implementation in domains such as geospatial data exchange, industrial data mining or personal data management, with a constant focus on interoperability and open standards. He is also actively committed to making open knowledge a reality. In recent years, he gained interest in Solid as a disruptive mean to give control back to individuals, and has been exploring Solid-based solutions since.
Speaker: Niko Bonnieure
NextGraph is an open source ecosystem providing solutions for end-users (a platform) and software developers (a framework/SDK), wishing to use or create decentralized apps featuring: live collaboration on rich-text, JSON documents and RDF, a sync protocol with end-to-end encryption, local-first based on CRDTs (it works offline too), portable and interoperable data, with high availability. We will explore how to create new apps based on RDF/Linked Data, with LDO, React and NextGraph Framework.
Niko Bonnieure is a software engineer specialized in encryption, local-first and linked data technologies. After working in big data startups for several years, and following the Snowden revelations in 2013, he decided to quit those jobs and dedicate his time to building a decentralized platform for secure and private apps based on graph databases. Niko is a strong advocate for Digital Sovereignty in Europe, and for Free and Open Source Software.