On the 28th of April 1953, IBM president Thomas Watson Jr. told stockholders that the company had expected to get orders for five machines in its most recent search for business, but that they actually got eighteen. A significant difference between expectation and reality has since become a staple feature of technological scale and development, especially when it comes to computers, their use and adoption. We now live in a world where the pace of change, the desire for the new, the interplay between businesses and consumers, and the balancing forces of rules and regulations result in an ever-shifting landscape of activity. Our expectations are frequently challenged, and perhaps what's surprising is that anything can still be surprising at all.
A new way forward for data and tech
One thing that remains constant, however, is business pressure that demands profit in the limit of what's possible under given conditions. The bleeding edge of technology cuts ahead of any forces that may restrain it, and companies at the forefront of innovation essentially define their own rules and boundaries. It has been said more than once - including by the World Economic Forum - that technology is fast and legislation is slow, and, as Fortune has asserted, "Asking for forgiveness, rather than permission, is Silicon Valley’s favourite business model." This is the reality of our modern global economy and has led to our current technological vista - a nexus of large organisations controlling the collection, storage and flow of data, much of it about users and their behaviour, as part of an omnipresent panoptical advertising machine.
Although the status quo may seem entrenched, it is anything but. There is an arena of alternative and developing approaches supported by numerous communities, including open source initiatives, which drive and support an evolutionary pressure. Importantly, this pressure is not directed by any established agenda, and is a free radical agent of change rooted in concepts broader than purely commercial. Considerations include privacy, public interest, responsibility and participation. Rather than inhibiting activity, these developing technologies offer alternative paths that satisfy needs on multiple levels, for both businesses and consumers, promoting data sharing benefits and reducing data storage burdens via new economic models.
Data privacy and the future of the Web
Solid is one such initiative seeking a change in data storage and access practices. It is an instance of what has come to be known as the third layer of the web, sometimes referred to as Web 3.0, which aims to empower users with full control of their data. From the early 1990s, the first layer of the web was comprised of static pages of information, the most interactivity being the ability to link from one page to another. Over the next decade or so, the second layer of the web evolved to provide much greater interactivity, feature rich, and, importantly, the ability to shuttle more data between users and businesses in multiple ways. The financial gene of society kicked in, and gave us today's world of online advertising, commerce, cookies and accounts.
It is these accounts that many of us have which are a crucial aspect of how we engage with online services, and how they in turn engage with our data, not only in terms of the services we expect, but also in terms of other services they provide to other businesses. Our data, in other words, is their product. This paradigm is shifted with Solid. Instead of having multiple accounts across numerous services, giving the same basic data to all of them each time, and more unique data to each service individually, Solid is built around the notion of encapsulated Personal Online Datastores (Pods). In this way of working, a user creates an account with a Pod vendor of their choice, which provides them with simple and secure online storage for their details and any files they choose to upload, and which is connected to…nothing. By default, there are no further services that can access this data. It's your space, and you're in control.
Importantly, a Pod doesn't have to remain unconnected. The vision is to have an ecosystem of apps and services that readily provide digital Pod connectors, allowing you to plug-and-play as you like, enabling as much or as little access to your content as you see fit, tailored to each connection. Do you want to allow a certain batch of photos to be seen by a certain group of people on your social media network of choice? No problem, flick the switch. Do you want your employer to access your national insurance number and bank details? Easy peasy. Any type of data, any type of service, any type of permission.
This vision is brought to you by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the core web protocols that have endured for over 35 years, co-founder of the house of ODI and more besides. Solid was initially sparked in 2015 by a financial award from Mastercard to TimBL's group at MIT, namely the Computer Sciences and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), in collaboration with the Qatar Computing Research Institute and Oxford University. In 2016, Solid was released.
An open standard for all
At its core, Solid is an open standard that can be built by anyone, a blueprint for creating Pods and enabling their interaction. To prove the point and go one further, in 2018 Sir Tim co-founded a commercial venture based on Solid called Inrupt, which raised $30 million within its first few years. Following Inrupt's launch of their enterprise offering in 2020, they have been entrusted with providing server software in a number of high-profile cases, such as the national citizen data scheme of Flanders as well as pilot projects at the BBC and NHS. Still going strong in 2024, Inrupt's software has recently become ISO-certified, a first of its kind, which further shows the potential of the Solid specification.
In the spirit of the early internet, Solid has had a dedicated entourage of developers, researchers, academics and others, working together and convening in its open community forum. Established in 2018, the forum gained hundreds of members within its first few months, and approximately 60,000 developer Pods had been activated by that time. Work progressed in earnest to create an ecosystem of Solid apps for general data management, notes, contacts, messaging, blogging, social media and more. This wealth of activity is reflected in the forum content, which, at the time of writing, contains 1,854 separate threads contributed to by 1,606 members, accruing over 116 thousand views in the top 10 most popular threads alone.
Solid and the Open Data Institute
More recently, in October 2024 the ODI became Solid's formal steward. This arrangement allows for the existing community to focus on bringing their prototypes and ideas to life, having been openly incubated in recent years, while the ODI provides support and leadership in terms of governance and management. Under its own steam the community has already created a wealth of content for a range of audiences, from new users looking to get started to seasoned developers. Topics encompass: the history of the initiative; its purpose and mission; design and features; security and cryptography; app development in a range of programming languages; finance and opportunities for collaboration, business and recruitment; as well as events, volunteering, local groups and hackathons, from San Francisco to Krakow to Beijing. Solid clearly has solid foundations, and the sky's the limit with the ODI's help in this next stage of development.
From large drum machines in the 1950s and even earlier, through to the mainframes of the 1960s, the microcomputers and minicomputers that followed, and the ongoing miniaturisation and portability that has continued ever since, hardware has undergone a clear evolution which is plain to see. First filling whole rooms with equipment, then desktops at work, then desktops at home, and finally bags and then pockets when on the move, devices have become a part of our modern world. Software has become slicker, richer, more visual and intuitive, and today's user experience is a far cry from what it was in Thomas Watson Jr.'s day.
But what is less apparent than the evolution of hardware and software is the evolution of data practices. Data's just there, right? It's just the stuff that is created, stored, moved around and changed as needed, and in many ways is easy to forget. It's like forgetting that we're in quite a nice atmosphere full of lovely oxygen, which is absolutely crucial to anything we care about happening at all. But the hardware and software are there to serve the data, and the data is there to represent, and to serve, us. There is ongoing change to all of these components and how they're represented, shaped and used in both physical and digital worlds. New initiatives and their enthusiastic communities are crucial to spur this evolution on, and to create the digital future. In Solid, there is a vision that reminds us that the journey is not over.
