From October 2024, The Open Data Institute (ODI), co-founded by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Sir Nigel Shadbolt, will bring Solid - an open standard developed to give individuals and organisations greater control over their data - into its data stewardship activities. The Solid project, protocol, and community will become part of the ODI’s wider portfolio to promote ethical data sharing and build a more transparent, secure, and user-centric data ecosystem.
Solid, initially developed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s Lab at MIT and their collaborators, allows people to manage and control personal data using Personal Online Data Stores (Pods). The technology ensures that data is no longer centralised around applications but instead is centred around the user. This shift enables individuals to decide how their data is collected, accessed, stored, and shared, addressing growing concerns about privacy, transparency, and control in the digital world.
The ODI and Solid have common goals to ensure that data is managed ethically, transparently, and in ways that benefit individuals, businesses, and society. Taking on the organisational stewardship of Solid is a natural extension of the ODI’s work across the data spectrum—from open to shared to closed data. As a long-time leader in promoting ethical data use, the ODI recognises that data governance must adapt to reflect the complexities of today’s digital world. While a commitment to open data remains a key principle of the ODI, not all data can or should be public. Solid - and other Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) - represents an essential part of the data spectrum, allowing individual control over personal data while ensuring privacy and security.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee said:
“By providing the organisational stewardship of Solid, the ODI will be a driving force in unlocking personal data to empower individuals in a secure and transparent way.
The Solid Protocol is a huge push for interoperability. It’s a common standard that gives individuals control over their data and allows data interoperability between apps. You can decide who to share your data with - doctors, family, friends, colleagues - so your data can be used to solve big problems from personal health to climate change. It also creates a whole new market for apps so you can choose how to view your photos or fitness or health data. It is technology centred around you: pro-human technology.
All technology must be rolled out with the right policies, regulations, and, where necessary, legislation. The ODI understands this and has been the place to achieve alignment. I am excited they will now bring their expertise to Solid Pods, just as they have for Open Data and Smart Data schemes like Open Banking.
The ODI and Solid’s, now shared vision - to establish a data ecosystem that benefits individuals, organisations and society - reflects my own. It is an opportunity to correct our global data infrastructure to one that encourages collaboration, stimulates creativity and fosters compassion - my original hope for the web.”
Sir Nigel Shadbolt said:
“We want to provide governments and organisations with the knowledge and tools to build and deliver user-centric services while enabling responsible innovation. These are vital for a strong data infrastructure that drives economic growth and capital efficiency. Along with our 12 years of work across the data spectrum, including (most recently) in data assurance, data-centric AI and smart data, these components can help ensure that data governance evolves to meet the challenges of the modern digital economy.
In an age of increasing platform power, individual citizens and consumers, groups and collectives, must be offered control and agency over how their data is used. Solid provides a set of standards and a framework for making that agency a reality. The ODI is committed to helping build a trusted data ecosystem that works for everyone.”
Solid’s user-centric model decentralises control over data and addresses many privacy challenges by giving individuals granular agency over their data. In practical terms, Solid has already shown its potential through Inrupt, which has provided enterprise-grade Solid software for projects, including with the government of Flanders and pilots with the likes of the NHS in Greater Manchester.
The ODI is looking forward to building on the work of the Solid Community and Inrupt’s deployments at a time when public trust in data governance continues to erode, and the need for technologies like Solid becomes more urgent. A recent study shows that only 11% of global citizens trust their governments to protect their privacy. Solid helps rebuild trust by offering individuals greater control over their data while providing organisations with secure, user-approved access to the information they need for innovation and decision-making.
The move also supports the ODI’s 2023-2028 strategy, which addresses global trends such as increasing privacy concerns, technological changes, and the need for cross-border data flows. Working together, the ODI and Solid will continue to build an open, trustworthy data ecosystem that benefits society and the economy while safeguarding privacy and encouraging responsible data use.
NOTES TO EDITORS
For media enquiries and interviews:
Nicole Greenslade 07769 711 635 - [email protected]
About the ODI
The ODI is a non-profit organisation with a mission to work with companies and governments to build an open, trustworthy data ecosystem where people can make better decisions using data and manage any harmful impacts. We work with various organisations, governments, public bodies and civil society to create a world where data works for everyone. Our work includes applied research, consultancy services, training, free reports, tools and webinars.
We focus our efforts on three broad areas:
- Improving the data practices of organisations so that they can build and manage adequate data infrastructure and data use.
- Tackling challenges so that the data ecosystem works better.
- Gathering and creating research, evidence and knowledge about data and benefits of open, trustworthy data access.
The ODI was co-founded in 2012 by the inventor of the Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee and artificial intelligence expert Sir Nigel Shadbolt to show the value of data and to advocate for its innovative use to affect positive change across the globe. We’re an independent, non-profit, non-partisan company headquartered in London with an international reach.
About Solid
Solid is an open standard for managing digital identities and storing personal data for re-use across applications on the Web. The goal of Solid is for people to have more agency over their data. Solid is both a project and a specification for a user-centric data storage system. Data is hosted in people’s personal online data stores, which are called Pods. Through Solid, control over what happens to people’s data is now "distributed" back to the user. Solid is a user-centric rather than a decentralised technology. Data in Solid is centralised around users instead of centralised around applications. The data is distributed, making it both highly available and easier to use at scale. It decentralises control and governance. But not the data itself. More information can be found in the Solid FAQs
