Solid Team Meeting

April 21st, 2021

Present

MB: Marrelle Bailey
JB: Justin Bingham
JM: Jackson Morgan
TBL: Tim Berners-Lee
OZ: Oz Olivo
RV: Ruben Verborgh
VT: Vincent Tunru
JZ: Jeff Zucker
KK: Kay Kim
NS: Nicolas Seydoux

Agenda

Announcements
Topic Items
- DEI Charter - https://github.com/solid/process/pull/254
- Solidproject.org
  - JB - Consider moving production from Netlify to Digital Ocean re: https://github.com/solid/solidproject.org/issues/514
  - JB - Propose two more content sessions to finish about page changes
- Solid Forum
  - JB - Migrate to Discourse in EU or US?
- Solid Process
  - JB - Propose working session to discuss changes needed

Minutes

CSS Update

RV: Pending resolution on IdP

DEI Update

MB: Getting perspectives and feedback on the charter in Github. Concern on wording / role titles. Final changes to be made, then will be submitted to Tim.

JB: How to engage team / get help on inclusion efforts when doing community actions?

MB: Surveys / feedback - where's the pipeline of bringing people in? Where are people stopping and why? Do more outreach into communities that aren't educated. Getting people from places that we know. Some of the communities we are pulling from aren't the most diverse. Training videos / content about how to create a more inviting community. Constructive feedback is important.

TBL: Make sure that we address problems specific to US but also globally.

MB: Ensure that we're inviting people from different communities and make it welcoming to them.

OZ: Need to reach equilibrium / get to baseline using approaches with a good track record, then start experimenting

RV: Let's include "skill" as a diversity dimension. Not talk about technical versus non-technical, but rather about positive skills such as developer, designer, end-user, lawyer, economist, sociologist, …

RV: Can we expect people to join for free? Is it not a privileged viewpoint to assume that everyone has spare time?

TBL: Need to be triaging people who are looking for funding with people that need it (or look at other variants of this).

JM: How to invite / get people involved?

MB: Engage with different orgs / academic institutions. Look at proposing projects with ability to present at events like Solid World.

JB: Is the forum a place we need to pay more attention to? Are we inviting people that are arriving at the forum but not getting enough engagement?

TBL: Ensure that we have enough multi-lingual support across properties / platform / technologies.

OZ: Communities are a combination of many different communities. Should look to establish leaders across various communities / groups, and then work with those leaders.

VT: Caution against going towards things/terminology that are too US-specific because that can drive away people Non-US people.

JZ: A lot of different dimenstions to diversity (gender issues, disability issues, underrepresented continents and countries)

KK: Side note: Ensure we don't accidentally exclude people unwittingly (e.g. America is greater than US)

KK: If we get people with diverse backgrounds (e.g., designers, teenagers, etc.) - how do we move along with some of the agendas that might help? E.G. we previously discussed action items (e.g., forum for apps where people can ask for feedback/testing/etc., forum for jobs/internships, forum for guiding people to get started) -- where are we in these so that we have ways to engage. That is, if we start making inroads of getting people in - but all we have is - "here read the spec" - it's not fun / lost opportunity. Ensure that in parallel with the outreach, once people get here, they feel like they can get their foot in the door and get engaged.

JB: Propose action item to look at where the forum fits in the inclusion strategy

NS: Important to ensure that we attend to the website as part of the inclusion strategy and keep improving it. Live user testing sessions were productive in the past.

NS: Propose action item - Reach out to Jose Labra Gayo, and see if his students would give some feedback on the website.

NS: Make available slide decks / illustrations that are easy for people to get to explain solid to others.

MB: Have been working on a slide deck to explain solid to others.

JM: Getting people to experience Solid could be done by introducing them to Solid apps.

TBL: Think more about solid user roles