This hackathon resulted in the creation of three applications, with the winning team taking home a prize of £1,000 and having the opportunity to present their creation at Solid Symposium. It served to demonstrate the potential that exists for relative newcomers to become quickly familiarised with Solid to the extent that they can develop proofs of concept in a matter of days, and will serve as a template for further Solid hackathons in future.
Background
Since having assumed responsibility for the stewardship of Solid in October 2024, the ODI has been keen to contribute to advancing the development and adoption of the standard, to realise the goal of giving individuals and organisations greater control over their data. Part of this process involves encouraging the development of applications that can help realise the potential of Solid as a standard that can enable greater interoperability of data in ways that provide benefits and convenience to users in ways that have been unrealised up until now. Existing applications range from functional pod browsers, such as Penny, to offline-first recipe managers, such as Umai.
It is with this in mind that the ODI ran a hackathon in the days preceding Solid Symposium 2026, where participants were invited to build a new generation of personal AI agents, apps, and websites that give people real control over their own data.
Solid Hackathon
The hackathon itself took place over the course of 2.5 days, with the first half day dedicated to familiarising newcomers with Solid, with the following two days dedicated to development, presentation and adjudication of the eventual applications.
Day 1 - Introducing Solid
Those attending the pre-hackathon element of the workshop included 16 participants from countries including, but not limited to, the UK, Netherlands, USA and India. Participants had varying levels of experience with Solid, with some having worked with Solid for many years and others having only discovered Solid in the previous months. There was a range of interests in learning more about Solid amongst participants, with one noting an interest in the potential for commercial applications of Solid within business, with others showing interest in the transformative potential of Solid to enable a greater granularity of individual control of how and when their data is accessed by others.
The workshop itself began with a demonstration of the Solid prototype presentation developed by Tim Theys, to show how Solid could look from a user perspective. This prompted questions from the participants around how users can update data in their pods, especially relating to health and fitness data, given that this is always changing.
Throughout the remainder of the workshop, participants were provided with presentations that introduced some of the fundamental elements of Solid that would be necessary for them to get up and running, and build Solid applications. This included a presentation on building with the Object Mapper and an overview of application templates, as well as a presentation on shapes and data models. These were interactive sessions that provided participants with the opportunity to ask questions to help better understand the fundamentals of Solid.
Day 2 - Developing Solid applications
The hackathon component commenced on the second day, with introductions to the ODI by Kim Sorensen and an overview of Solid from ODI Solid Lead, Jesse Wright. In these opening remarks, both emphasised the importance of contributing to the Solid ecosystem through the ideation and creation of apps that can help realise the potential of Solid.
Following this, participants were invited to propose their ideas for possible applications to develop throughout the course of the next day and a half. The proposals included a variety of applications, including:
- An app that could aid people with ADHD to understand their symptoms and the effects of different brands of medications that could help them manage these
- An app that put a modern spin on the idea of visiting cards, where users would be able to curate data about themselves to create personas to use in making introductions
- An app that could aid the interactions between pods, potentially for healthcare purposes
- An app to facilitate verifiable and privacy-preserving communication between constituents and their members of parliament, so that they can remain anonymous
- A collective intelligence tool to contextualise agents that can interact as advocates within a network of pods
- An app targeted at the education sector, that could be used to offer greater control over how student data is stored and made available to the student themself
After the ideation session, participants spent time interacting with each other to establish teams of 4-5 and settle on the applications that they would work on for the remainder of the hackathon. The final applications included:
- An app to enable users to consolidate their financial information from a range of different accounts, with functionality to enable the user to share parts of this information with other organisations and/or institutions
- Bunbury: the application that had been proposed to create calling cards, with a focus placed on how these could be used within academic settings, such as conferences, to help facilitate making new connections in new locations based on sharing information on the user's interests
- Case notes: a data management application, which could help enable the sharing of data held in one place to another
- A fourth application that focused on the management of individuals' control of and granting of access to health data.
The teams spent the rest of the second day and first half of the third day working on the development of their respective applications, with guidance and support provided by both the ODI team and members of the wider Solid ecosystem.
Day 3 - Adjudication of the developed applications
After spending the morning and early afternoon developing and finessing their applications, the teams then presented their work to the panel of judges, consisting of Amada Brock, CEO of OpenUK and OpenHQ; Pierre-Antoine Champin, Principal Data Strategist at W3C; Noel De Martin, developer and entrepreneur; and Oshani Seneviratne, Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
The panel prefaced their results by stating how impressed they had been with the creativity of the teams, and to an even greater extent, the way in which they had managed to so competently get to grips with Solid in such a short space of time. For their evaluation, the panel judged the applications on three sets of criteria:
- Impact: in which they considered the real-world relevance; breadth of potential reach; the value at the hackathon stage; and the roadmap credibility for beyond the hackathon.
- Usability: including the ease of onboarding for new users; accessibility, particularly for those unfamiliar with Solid; task efficiency, regarding the minimisation of friction in core workflows and the forgiveness of their apps, to allow users to recover from mistakes.
- Solid conference: including whether the project made use of guidance and resources; how the app worked both with data held in a user’s Pod, as well as how the app could enrich this data for use in other applications; and finally, the extent to which the application enables greater meaningful control over how the user’s data is used, collected and shared.
After deliberation, the judges returned their results:
- Bunbury (Winner): praised by the judges for having had the best understanding of Solid, how they had differentiated themselves from usual content with the novelty of their application, the success of their collaboration having brought a group of strangers together to build something great in such a short space of time.
- Case notes: the judges felt that this application demonstrated the utility of vibe-coding for the development of Solid apps and that the management app was highly relevant. The panel was also impressed with how the team had managed to create something that worked in the time available to them, however they felt that for the app to have scored higher it could have benefited from a greater understanding of how Solid and Pods work
- Financial application: praised for the UI and UX, the judges felt that there was a need for greater tech input on the interfaces, however they did not believe that this would be an insurmountable barrier. Partly due to the ambition of the application, the judges also raised that there would be challenges associated with the copying of financial data, which could prove difficult for further development.
Overall, the judges were impressed with how quickly the teams had managed to pick up and run with Solid and were inspired by what they had managed to achieve throughout the course of the hackathon.
Post-hackathon
As winners of the hackathon, the Bunbury team received the prize award of £1,000 as well as the opportunity to present their application to the audience of the Solid Symposium later that week.
In terms of next steps, this was the first of a number of planned Solid hackathons to be hosted by the ODI. This instance has provided encouragement of what can be achieved, as well as learnings to enhance the next iterations, as the ODI looks to help promote the adoption of Solid and the creation of applications that can facilitate the burgeoning growth of the Solid ecosystem.
