Practice Session: Topics & Areas

[mrkvon]

Please propose content for our Practice Sessions (2nd Thursday of each month, 15:00 UTC):

• Topic you would like to focus on,
• Issue or
• Project you want help with.

We'll schedule them for one of the upcoming meetings.

Let's also identify Areas of general interest we can focus on as fallback.

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Summary of answers:

• How do you manage data in your Solid app? (querying, managing state, caching, local first...)
• Where should I add data? Organizing and interoperability of data in Solid Pods & apps.
• How do I keep my codebase flexible with AuthZ and AuthN changes
• SHACL/Shex Shapes for app development and interoperability
• Onboarding experience, particularly UX, for a new user
• Authorization, access policies (WAC, ACP, SAI...)
• Mark yourself present in a CG/PG meeting
• Testing Solid apps
• Solid Catalog
• Social features in Solid
• Food distribution and food security

[mrkvon]

Area: How do you manage data in your Solid app? (querying, managing state, caching, local first...)

[mrkvon]

Topic: Where should I add data? Organizing and interoperability of data in Solid Pods & apps.

Somebody mentioned this in a meeting.

[elf-pavlik]

Area: Aiming at moving target. Given current variety in solid ecosystem (eg. ACP, WAC, SAI Auth, ODRL+UMA Auth etc.) and changes coming in LWS WG. How do I keep my codebase flexible and ready to evolve as the ecosystem evolves.

[mrkvon]

Good one & tough one. 👍🏼

[mrkvon]

Area: SHACL/Shex Shapes for app development and interoperability.

[uvdsl]

Do you see a relation to Client-to-Client standards here?

[mrkvon]

Yes, 💯

[KamiQuasi]

Mentioned today in the meeting: there is difficulty in using Solid for small business and non-profits I have influence with. I don't necessarily want to be a WebID provider nor a Pod provider, but the experience for a new user is a jarring experience. Example: If I want to leverage Solid for a school's Parent Teacher Association (PTA), and a user is on the PTA website and wants to "register" and is sent to a completely different website that is not branded nor has any reference to the PTA AND is a completely foreign registration experience it is difficult to justify that experience to use Solid.

[mrkvon]

Topic(UX): Onboarding experience for a new user.

[jeff-zucker]

A topic much in need of attention.

[mrkvon]

Area: Authorization, access policies (WAC, ACP, SAI...).

[CxRes]

@matthieubosquet Suggest coding session on ACP patterns with Solid as discussed in Practitioners coding meeting on 08/01/2026.

[elf-pavlik]

Project: This could be a pet project with relatively simple MVP - mark yourself present in a CG/P meeting

I have some old notes and messy code (which i wouldn't continue with) in https://github.com/hackers4peace/sai-js/tree/main/examples/plenary

There are some more compex features but if we can get mark yourself present in 3 months that would be a good start. And we can use one tap on a mobile device instead of the "please add yourself to present in hackmd" incantations and typing one's name + webid for the 10000th time

[elf-pavlik]

To avoid getting into data replication. I would start following what we do now. Currently we have a shared pad and add presence there. I would start with having a group storage, with chairs as admins. Events and presence would be hosted in that group storage and regular participants would have limited access, for example they could add themselves as present, or to get started anyone as present.

[masterworrall]

Yes, I'd like to understand the design patterns. Eg. What does it mean to "share" a resource between people in the Solid architecture and does each user use a Solid App instance to interact with the resource. Things like that.

[elf-pavlik]

In open ecosystem, I always assume that each user can choose whatever Solid App they want to use. In https://sai.js.org I put a lot of focus on allowing users to authorize apps they use without any interaction from the resoure owner.

[jeff-zucker]

While this sounds like a fun project, it is, in my opinion, not suitable for Practitioners coding sessions. To quote the README - "this group is people actively working on projects aimed at specific real-world products using Solid, especially products which promote social benefit". This means projects aimed at people outside the tech world bubble most of us live in. While creating something like this would benefit us techies and help us run our meetings, it does nothing to assist practitioners working on projects, does not connect us with the world outside of our own bubble, is not related to social benefit, and does not promote adoption of Solid by the uninitiated. We have practitioners working on food insecurity, homelessness, disability, and other real world issues and those are the kinds of things we should be targeting in these coding sessions. The main question we should ask about these topic proposals is - does this support Practitioners in building their projects? Solid could benefit from a more general coding session, but this isn't it, this is for Practitioners. I am holding myself to the same standard, see my comments on the catalog below.

[jeff-zucker]

I just looked at Paul's discussion #37 and that is a real world request. So if the focus was on working with that community rather than on building something for the CG/PG, it would be a good Practitioner's project and what I said above does not apply.

[mrkvon]

Topic: Testing Solid apps

writing automated tests (vitest/jest, Playwright, ...), test-first, ...

[mrkvon]

Project: Solid Catalog

https://github.com/solid/catalog

This project has been founded and built by @jeff-zucker, recently ODI took a dev & maintainer role.
Practitioners can have a more prominent role in building and maintaining Catalog, e.g. during Practice sessions.

[jeff-zucker]

It would be great if some Practitioners took an active role in helping guide the direction of the Catalog. We, as Practitioners, have a better idea of what the general public and new developers need than others do so I think we should be actively involved in that aspect of the Catalog. As far as Practitioners coding on it - of course anyone is welcome, but ODI has made a commitment to do that. I'd rather see the coding sessions focused on projects by other Practitioners that focus outside of our tech bubble.

[mrkvon]

Topic: Social features in Solid

Most Solid apps developed today have been for individuals. But how do we add interactions and other social features to a Solid app?

@KamiQuasi

[jeff-zucker]

Perhaps as a followup to the upcoming ActivityPods presentation, we could have a hands on, how to join the fediverse.

[mrkvon]

Project: Food distribution and food security

Founders & contributors of the respective projects:

• Baltimore Food Project - Tom Byrd
• Comidas Gratis - @KamiQuasi