Solid Team Meeting

May 12th, 2021

Present

Justin B
Marrelle B
Oz O
Alain B
Ruben V
Nicolas AS
Tim BL
Jackson M
Kay K
Olivia L
Dmitri Z
Vincent T

Agenda

Github Project for tracking team tasks
Recap - Forum Migration
Upcoming - Site Migration / Digital Ocean, Solid
Proposed - Application Listing in the Forum

Minutes

MB: Will be taking on project management for Solid Team :tada:

MB: Github repo has been setup for team tracking - https://github.com/solid/team/projects

The forum

MB: Migrated the forum to discourse.org

JB: Migration of the Solidproject.org from Netlify to DigitalOcean so that we can run it on Solid. That would allow to drive the site with data collected from Solid Pods.

MB: Feature applications from the forum to the website in order to get more engagement and to allow more collaboration around existing apps. Enable the community to update the app listing using tags on the forum, sort apps based on likes. (including a demo)

NS: Prompt developers of known applications (e.g. Noel De Martin) to initially register their apps so that we check everyting works/nothing is missing.

TBL: Tagging an app "Under construction" MUST be associated to a ticket open.

TBL: We could enable tipping developers

RV: Great, but let's make sure that we keep the bigger messaging in mind: Solid is a project that aims to change the world. So it cannot only be hobby/tip-supported apps (as much as I appreciate them); we need to present this as one facet of the ecosystem.

NS: +1 on messaging that Solid is for major projects as well as smaller apps, but tipping developers is a fairly common practice in the industry (GH sponsors, npm fund), so I don't expect it to reflect bad on us if we offer this option.

OO: What is the problem that we want to solve by involving the community in app ranking ?

MB: Due to bandwidth issues, we can't really maintain the app listing on the website, so in order to build trust by not showing an app listing with a lot of broken apps, we want to rely on the community.

JB: A segment of the community is only involved through the forum (as opposed to e.g. GH issues), so dedicating more effort of the team to the forum is a step towards consolidating this community.

RV: Who does the forum work for? There is a significant amount of friction for me. The technology is an obstacle to me—am I the only one?

DZ: +1

OO: Is the nature of the issue around team engagement really a problem about engagement, or about the forum, it being the main medium to reach to the team.

TBL: Forum > gitter

AB: Did anyone tried Github discussions ?

Marrelle: Open a survey to answer OO question basically, and identify what are the needs from the community.

DZ: I think there's a combination of all those factors. 1) Community members want more access to the team/core devs. 2) General community members find forums a lot easier to engage with, than Gitter (and certainly than Github). 3) Developers find the forum really high-friction and high-traffic. 4) Marelle & Justin's app threads on the forum idea may be a low-key way to "bribe"/encourage devs to spend more time on the forum.

VT: I think the community mostly feels unheard when they're interacting on the forum - like talking into a void. It feels like "us and them", where the forum community is not part of the Solid community.

JB: Adding more structure and categories may help people navigating the forum. Having a specific space to welcome people would be an added value.

RV: For instance, this is what I see on the homepage https://css.verborgh.org/public/2021/forum.png It's so… random that I don't know where to click and just go somewhere else

MB: Let's study a couple of existing communities, potentially survey the Solid community, and see what the nexts steps are.

Vote: What about making it possible to add a link to donation for developers ? Majority says yes.

DEI panel

MB: Panel created, monthly (?) meetings

Website

KK: Should the hyperlinks be underlined when not hovered ?

RV: Taking the action item to see what are current accessibility guidelines, to report back on these.

JM: https://webaim.org/techniques/hypertext/link_text#underlining, either underline or 3:1 contrast ratio.

Open questions

AB: solidcommunity.net does not have automatic backup restore.