Data Spaces are now a global movement. Initiated in Europe, we already see them replicated in the United States, in China and in India. Of course the shapes and forms vary, as well as the way to get there, and nobody is so sure yet what they are, and how to use them.

At Startin’blox, we have been involved in the creation of interoperable and decentralized data spaces for 5 years, working on 30 different projects in 3 different continents. In this article, we want to share our experience about how to build Data Spaces that are part of the current digital economy, and not outlandish.

From siloed platforms to interoperable ecosystems

The web economy is currently handled by a handful of siloed platforms that lock their users in, and encapsulate their data in a black box. If as a shop owner, I upload my products on Amazon to sell online for example, I can only sell on Amazon. I cannot reuse the data of my products to sell on another platform. I cannot reuse the goodwill I’ve built with my customers on another platform. My products’ data is locked in. My user account is locked in.

To integrate these platforms to data spaces, or to create data spaces that can compete on their turf, one necessary step is data interoperability, i.e. having web platforms where data is not locked in, and where user accounts are not locked in. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has been working on this challenge for as long as the Web has existed, that is to say more than 30 years, and has come up with a set of standards to make these “Data Space enabled” platforms possible. To name a few for the connoisseurs in the audience: Verifiable Credentials (VC), Decentralized Identifiers (DID), Resources Description Framework (RDF), Linked Data Platform (LDP), Access Control Policy (ACP), Linked Data Notifications (LDN).

To simplify communication, most of these standards are gathered under a single banner: Solid. Solid aims to create interoperability between web platforms, enabling data to be expressed consistently across platforms, and to get rid of the black box effect. If all the platforms were Solid compatible, I could display my list of products registered on Amazon on other e-commerce platforms, and vice versa.

The value Data Spaces bring to their members depends on their capacity to unify access to data. By leveraging the state-of-the-art W3C Solid standards, they can unlock high-value use cases, e.g. real-time multimodal transport, otherwise impossible.

From single platforms to interconnected services

In the previous section, we saw that data interoperability between platforms is a first condition to turn them into a successful data space, but it is not enough. Having a common way to express data, e.g. the departure time of a transport, does not create any revenue. In order to add business value to this data sharing, they need to integrate it to their business model and foster revenue. This is where transactions come into play.

A transaction is a purchase, from a buyer to a seller. When I’m ordering food online, when I’m ordering a ride, when I’m buying a product: I’m issuing a transaction. Transactions today are happening within the platforms’ black boxes. As an example, I can only buy a ride from a specific driver on Uber, if it is the app she has registered herself on. I cannot use another application to issue that transaction.

Beckn is a decentralized protocol to enable cross-platform transactions. Thanks to Beckn, complex multi-businesses interactions, e.g. multimodal transportation, ordering a taxi and a train ticket from a single app becomes commonplace. Different applications, potentially an infinity of them, are then able to sell the different products and services found in a given Data Space.

The value Data spaces can bring to their end users depends on their capacity to seamlessly transact with multiple businesses. By leveraging Beckn, the biggest transaction protocol in the world, Data Space bring new business opportunities to their end users, e.g. ordering a taxi and a train ticket in a single transaction.

From a couple of gatekeepers to a galaxy of Data Space applications

So the data of our platforms are now compatible with one another thanks to Solid, and we can now trigger sales from any application to any company thanks to Beckn. Is this enough to integrate Data Spaces into the Web economy?

Well… how will the end users interact with the data space? Today, we use applications to interact with the data of the services that we use and to trigger transactions. When I shop on Amazon, I use an app that displays useful data to me, i.e. about the gym pants that I want to buy, and I issue a transaction when I end up buying my sexy tiger leggings (do not judge me). As an end-user, I have no clue about data standards, interoperability and decentralized transactions. All I care about is my user-friendly app and my privacy, I don’t want to know what’s behind it.

If we want Data Spaces to become part of the Web, they need to disappear. From the end user’s perspective, they need to become a pleasant shopping experience, a nice source of information or a useful service. They need to offer interfaces as diverse as the different use cases that exist among their end-users. Applications are the interface to access what the web has to offer today, and they will continue to be once Data Spaces blend with the web. A myriad of applications will be vying to become our favorite interface to carry on a specific type of transactions, e.g. ordering a car ride.

Web components is a standard fostering modularity and reusability on the web. By bringing this modularity to data spaces, web components bring data spaces into the hands of the end-users, without them knowing about data spaces at all. For instance, the cart component that I use to buy my sexy leggings can be a web component shared by thousands of over web platforms, lowering the cost to develop them and improving the overall quality and user experience. Modularity is therefore key to scaling data space beyond the niche of early adopters.

The amount of financial interactions end users will have with their Data Spaces directly depends on their user-friendliness. Thanks to Web Components , Startin’blox offers super-powered applications, e.g. ordering my entire transport journey from the website of my airline.

Wrapping up

We do not mean to pretend we have all the answers. Which company is responsible for customer support when a traveler is having an issue with her multimodal train-plane-taxi ticket? How to ensure a quality delivery in a world where an infinity of platforms can sell your products? How not to overwhelm the end user with info in a world where theoretically every platform can sell any service or product? We do not know.

What we know is that there is a way to integrate Data Spaces to the Web economy, with production ready protocols and identified value-added use cases. Our goal is to ease the integration of data spaces for any end-user, individual or small business, big corporation or public administration.

If this prospect sounds exciting, if you think we are daydreaming, or if you simply have a comment you’d like to share, please reach out at alex@startinblox.com.

Read more articles

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At Startin’blox, we are interested in interoperability not for its technical aspects but for the impact it has on organizations, on the autonomy of users, on the sovereignty of states and organizations, and on democracy. That’s why we co-signed an article in Le Monde.
In 2020, during discussions with Sharers&Workers, Cap Digital, #leplusimportant and other organizations, we considered that this is a major subject, eminently political, and that it must be dealt with in a political manner and not left to be dealt with by technicians alone on technical considerations.
We have therefore undertaken the writing of this tribune, in order to show that this subject affects actors from all levels of society: companies, communities, unions, associations, activists. We all have a collective interest in ensuring that the web functions smoothly, where data can circulate freely and not be monopolized by a few monopolies, and this is what we want to convince with this initiative.

Read the article

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Within the Startin’blox cooperative, we are confronted with many issues related to open source and the decentralization of our tools and organizations, and we want to think about it with peers. It is in this context that we are launching a series of learning sessions.

The principle is to always start from difficulties encountered in the field of the cooperative in order to produce exchanges, content and relevant and singular reflections.

These events will be either community or public, and we will try together to raise the state of the art on how to ensure the flourishing of Open Source projects.
The objectives

Find solutions to the internal problems of the cooperative related to the open source and decentralization logics of our organization.
Find contributors and partners
Make great contributions to the world of Open Source

For whom?

The answer is again in our cooperative experience.

Here’s who we think of when we run these sessions:

A person coming to train to join our teams
Internal producers who continue to train
Our clients to help them facilitate their tools
Our members so they can make informed choices for the cooperative
All the members of our ecosystem, because we share values and therefore the same problems.

When does it start?

Right now!

The first session was about co-funding solutions in open source

Making a single organization fund an open source development that benefits everyone may seem unfair. Sylvain founded Open Funding to address this issue. The Open Funding experience lives on in Startin’blox.

We have some thoughts on the financing of our components that we would like to confront to our ecosystem. We know that there is not only one answer but a diversity and we would like to share the feedback.

The valorisation of the first session is already online.

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Is there a topic you would like us to explore further together?

Sessions are coming up on community animation and on the profession of product owner animator.

To signal your interest or propose a session, tell us by filling out this form!

Participate in the sessions

Whether you are a producer within the cooperative, a customer, a user, a member of the cooperative, a friend of the cooperative or a stranger who feels close to our topics, feel welcome!

We look forward to seeing you there!

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Hello Antoine, how about introducing yourself first?

Hello ! My name is Antoine, I’m 23 years old and I’m a project manager at ESS France since October, on “La République de l’ESS” -The Republic of the SSE.

My role is to take care of this project in almost all the fields. In particular, I followed up on the construction of our participatory platform with Startin’blox, I feed it with content, I do a little communication and I also work with the animation collective which is the project’s management body. Apart from the platform, I also participate in developing “La République de l’ESS” in other ways: organizing conferences, interviews, creating related sites…

We have also opened a second website, on the occasion of Black Friday: www.vivresansamazon.org. We wanted to position ourselves on the subject of consumption on large online sales platforms and so we created this site which highlights the solutions that the SSE can offer to develop a more responsible consumption.

Can you explain to us what ESS is? And “La République de l’ESS”?

The SSE is the Social and Solidarity Economy, that is to say all the structures that function and act with a solidarity and/or social utility object. It includes a lot of things, whether in terms of structures (associations, cooperatives, mutual societies, foundations…) or sectors of activity (all are represented in the SSE). All this represents 2.4 million employees, which is more than 10% of the total number of salaried jobs in France.

We can therefore see the ESS as a mosaic of structures of all sizes and in all sectors of the economy. This great diversity is a strength but also a weakness: myself at the beginning I had difficulty to understand what was the ESS concretely when it gathers big mutual societies present everywhere in France but also the local recycling. It was also difficult to bring such different actors around the same table, even though they all share the same values: social solidarity, a fairer society, a more equitable economy…

The Republic of SSE is precisely a project to gather all these people around the same objective: to build and address a common message showing that the social and solidarity economy can apply its methods and values to the whole society and make it more just and sustainable. This is what our participative platform is for, because we believe that all the actors involved in the SSE have ideas to make our society progress.

The other objective of “La République de l’ESS” is precisely to succeed in bringing back all this world (structures, networks but also the individuals who compose them) around this common project and to reinforce the capacity of SSE to “make movement”, beyond the differences of activity, territory and structures.

Why did you choose Startin’blox?

The choice of Startin’blox was motivated by several things. First of all, Startin’blox is a cooperative, and therefore a structure of the social and solidarity economy. It is important for us to know that the tool of “La République de l’ESS” is itself “made in ESS”, it gives more sincerity and authenticity to our will to gather around a project that wants to show that ESS can be a project of society.

Then, the development approach of Startin’blox was also important to us: to have an open source platform, with a control and a protection of the data and a will to limit the energy consumption related to their storage… All these are values that we share and that we want to put forward.

Finally, we wanted to have an efficient tool but also very scalable, because our project will evolve over time and Startin’blox offers us this possibility.

Do you have a last message for our readers?

Go to www.vivresansamazon.org ! It’s a good way to find solutions to make purchases while reducing your impact on the environment and supporting forms of production that are much more useful to society than the big online sales platforms. And I’ve even found gift ideas for Christmas in the stores we share on the site.

Otherwise, if you are interested in ESS, you can always join us on the platform www.larepubliqueess.org, you have to create an account but it is open to everyone and it talks about all subjects. You can submit your ideas or simply follow the debates and discover the events that we organize or that we relay.

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The subject of co-financing in open source is a broad topic that concerns actors at all levels and often joins the issue of financing free software in general. The purpose of this first session was to meet between actors concerned/interested by this issue and to identify lines of interest to specify the next sessions.

The different means of co-financing identified

The existing

Fund The Code events (formerly “Hackadons”)

Since 2013, several evenings have been organized to allow participants to distribute sponsor money to open source projects. It’s a friendly event format that allows to meet maintainers of beautiful projects, a format that everyone can take advantage of.

Bastien Guerry gave us some feedback on this topic, which I’ll come back to in a future article!

Subsidies

Whether state or regional, there are many opportunities in public funding (stimulus plan, Innovation, Incubation …). There is money in digital but perhaps a difficulty to find it.

How to make these opportunities more visible? What are the constraints to access this financing system?

Could we imagine contributing collectively to a shared monitoring of these opportunities?

Other solutions that we have not yet explored

• Philanthropy funds, although the economic implications are questionable.
• State calls for tenders or calls for common ground.
• Individual and organizational membership in a project
• Pooling of IT budgets of different organizations with common needs
• Mutualized trainings on the development of free tools
• Referral of experts in free software
• Sponsorship from large companies

What remains to be imagined ?

The Quebec Free Software Fund

This is an initiative of Drave Développement, a non-profit organization that proposes to meet the digital needs of Quebec through the opening of data and the promotion of free software in order to achieve digital sovereignty.

Noting that the digital sector is very profitable and that solutions using free software are not very present in Quebec, Drave proposes that the community should have an economic lever to finance companies and projects that use free technologies and that contribute to the vitality of the ecosystem.

The Fond du Libre Québécois is an investment fund dedicated to the financing of free software solutions with competitive returns to investors that allows to federate the efforts of the Quebec government, companies that develop and/or exploit digital commons as well as the civil society. For example, this fund will be used to start the virtuous circle of mutualized tenders by freeing up the resources needed to carry out large and lucrative public mandates.

In order to ensure the ethics and success of the projects that will benefit from the fund, Drave is putting forward a series of structuring initiatives: lobbying activities to ensure that free software is considered favorably, visibility of commercialization opportunities for free solutions, promotion of structuring projects carried out in collaboration with several stakeholders, definition of criteria and evaluation grids for ethical digital investments.

The initiative is inspiring and should be shared widely to feed the international ideosphere on the issues of digital sovereignty, communities of librist entrepreneurs and their prosperity.

The open roadmap

An Open Roadmap is a concept (we talk about it here and the wikipedia page on the subject does not exist yet…). It is a roadmap for a tool that is built by its various users according to their needs, expectations, constraints and priorities. In fact, the evolutions of the tool can be financed by several stakeholders. As you can see, this is a complex system to set up.

What if we developed a tool to manage the complexity of the system?

At Startin’blox and Open Food Network, for example, this system is currently implemented through a spreadsheet and the animation is either asynchronous or done during open forums.

Open funding had thought about the spec of such a tool, we continue at Startin’blox but as Rachel Arnould says, making a tool is not the most complicated thing. The most complicated part is its adoption by the community. Before putting a tool on the table, you have to make sure that the community is ready to co-finance it and to spend time discussing the common specifications (a nice challenge in itself). There is a strong human investment to be made in fostering this mentality. A tool is helpful but will not facilitate the pooling of resources if potential customers and users do not agree among themselves or do not want to spend time on it.

Sometimes our community doesn’t have money, how do we do it?

In the case of software solutions for associations or training organizations, it can be complicated to imagine a common pot by the users. The free price is a possibility but our system is not made for this kind of logic and this can be a blocking complexity.

The Meta Platform

We could imagine a cross between Kisskissbank, and the Gitcoin platform dedicated to free software on which everyone could express needs, improvements whether it is users or developers. This idea is very similar to the Open Funding project and to many others in fact. In this respect, it should be noted that the main difficulty encountered by Open Funding to keep the system alive was its dependence on rare profiles that require ultra transversal skills. The famous “5-legged sheep” that Sylvain mentions in the bonus of this podcast.

There are interesting initiatives to explore in the DAO (decentralized autonomous organization), a concept that is very present in the blockchain world.

An internal currency for the free software ecosystem

Jean Parpaillon mentioned this idea. In the world of blockchain, we have seen startups betting on a common currency. The players who contribute to this system will be able to pay themselves either in cash or in tokens (the unit of the common currency). This creates an emulation because the agents have an interest in increasing the value they share. The system is thus more resilient because if one organization in the ecosystem goes under, the others have not lost everything.

Of course, this includes a lot of economic notions, but it is an interesting approach because sharing a value is an incentive to cooperation and mutual aid.

Does the free currency model look like this (no link between fiat currency (EUR, etc) and June, is this a problem?)

The closest model is probably the S.E.L. model, with the difference that the use is not limited geographically, but for a specific business (creation of software under free license).

Endowment funds

If financing a feature is easier in terms of communication and user satisfaction, it appears that it is the actor at the end of the chain who recovers all the value generated. Who finances the software stack? SSh, postgres, PHP?

The difficulty of thinking about crowdfunding for these projects could make the creation of an endowment fund for these shadow technologies relevant.

A subject to be explored…

Pooling developers within kittens?

What if instead of pooling money, we pool developers? Some actors sometimes need specific skills on specific subjects. Difficult to recruit internally or to find the right freelance. Open source developers could be full-time in structures like the CHATONS and made available according to modalities to be discussed by the different actors who need this resource. Thus we would capitalize on their experiences and make them available to a larger ecosystem that is united around values.

Transversal issues identified

Free projects from the shadows

If the crowdfunding solution can easily be envisaged to finance specific functionalities, it is difficult to set up for the more complex technical stack to finance.

Pierre Ozoux of IndieHostersr: “We host open source software and sometimes we feel a bit of a pirate because we don’t always pay back to these software but we don’t have a lot of money either..We contribute to them in other ways too, but it’s always hard to assess a fair reciprocity.”

Another problem he raises is the fact that it’s the last player, at the end of the value creation chain, that picks up all the slack…

Pierre Ozoux of Indieshoster: “We have already taken Nextcloud support. This represented half the resale price. We didn’t like the business relationship very much. It’s a bit frustrating. Over the 6 months, we asked one question, but outside of support, so it went unanswered. Also we wonder, in our stack, we use Nextcloud but in fact it’s PHP, there is also Redis, Postgres, ssh, and why finally we would give half of the value creation only to Nextcloud? There is already not much left for us, but then for the rest of the stack … That’s a problem. Basically, we don’t have the same values, and we don’t work with them anymore. And with onlyOffice, when we pay, the software is no longer free, so the issue is resolved.

The profile of the product owner animator

As I mentioned in the passage on the meta platform, there is a recurring problem in the free software world. The developers who develop free solutions are not necessarily product owners, project managers or community leaders.

However, to make a software solution live, they have to get money, make the solution known, listen to users’ expectations and feedback, prioritize the evolutions, keep the solution coherent.

Open funding offered support for developers to bring their software solutions to life. Today, Startin’blox is trying to draw the contours of a product owner’s job. In this context, we organize learning sessions on this subject. You can register via the form at the end of the article.

The cohabitation of commercial and voluntary community contribution

How to raise money without losing your community? Should we separate the free contribution part from the commercial part? Jean Parpillon gave us a feedback on the Mandriva company. The issue is so rich that it will be the subject of a dedicated article. If you also have experiences to share on this subject, you can share them in the form at the end of the article.

Sharing resources

• ng in Public : The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software par Nadia Eghbal
• L’appel à commun, système qui vise à dépasser l’approche limitante des appels à projets par Movilab avec une proposition de méthode de financement participatif dans le cadre de l’appel à commun de l’ADEME.
• Un joli focus sur le logiciel libre en Nouvelle Aquitaine
• Un compte commun sur Liberapay, une plateforme de dons récurrents axée sur le financement des communs numériques, pour financer les développeurs de Liberapay
• BCDevExchange, une plateforme de mise en relation entre vendeur et acheteur en Colombie britannique pour permettre au gouvernement de fournir de meilleur service numérique.
• Le guide d’animation des projets open sources
• Pour comprendre l’intervention de Pierre de IndieHosters, sur la répartition de la valeur encaissée sur les outils open source utilisé dans nos créations logicielles, une présentation du Fosdem 21 : Does open source need its own Priority of Constituencies? pär Tobie Langel, recommandé par Bastien Guerry.
• Gitcoin est une plateforme qui vous permet d’être payé pour travailler sur des logiciels open source.
• Le financement quadratique, méthode mathématique pour financer des communs de façon démcratique
• Transcendance, un outil porté par Place Libre pour l’émergence de modèles économiques d’intérêt général.
• Open Collective, une plateforme numérique Open Source qui permet à tous les citoyen·ne·s de créer un « collectif » en ligne pour répondre à une problématique sociale et/ou environnementale sur son territoire par la facilitation de collecte d’argent.
• Cobudget, une plateforme en version beta pour allouer des fonds de façon collaborative et transparente.

It’s up to you to sketch out the next steps!

Following this session, I tried to identify your various topics of interest and the themes to explore. On this basis, I am offering you a small consultation to help me identify the next topics for the learning sessions.

Also, we are giving a lot of space to spontaneous proposals and initiatives. The “Free Expression” field is there for that.

Thanks again to all participants! I count on you to make this learning session initiative work in your ecosystems in order to enrich these exchanges.

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SemApps is a server project based on Solid specifications just like Startin’blox technology. The two projects have a lot of complementarities and the challenge of this residency was to make the teams meet and spend some time together in order to create a context conducive to cooperation.

This residency was very precious! Thank you AV for the invitation

And thank you all for trusting me both for the interview and for the editing!
The storyline

During this residency, I interviewed a lot of people and always with the same frame:

- Hi, who are you? What are you doing? Why are you here?
- Can you tell us about the project you are currently working on?
- Your intellectual journey in three moments, three meetings.
- In 5 years, if all goes well, where are you? Where are we?
- If you had to explain interoperability to a schoolboy?

Actually, I’ve asked a lot more
The objective

Through these interviews, the objective is to make you understand what our projects consist of through the eyes and the intellectual path of the people who contribute to them.

We need as many people as possible to understand the stakes of our technologies, both tech and non-tech. And especially the non-techs in fact.

Help us to advance interoperability on the web by sharing these podcasts widely!
Warning

These were originally supposed to be videos and I just had my phone to record so the sound quality is poor. The next takes will be better

And I took some liberties in the editing, I made my first podcast a week ago, I’m still looking for myself

The podcasts will be posted here on this article as they are exported.

Have a good listen !
Security in a decentralized web by Plup

Thanks to Blue Sky Blues by Kara Square (c) copyright 2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/60675 Ft: Admiral Bob
The solid project explained to my grandmother

Thanks to Vieja Escuela by mikolahjacksona (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mikolahjacksona/31828 Ft: amar azul, mindmapthat

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Can you go back to the origins of the web and its standards?

We are at the end of the 1980s and Tim Berners-Lee is an engineer at Cern, at a time when all researchers use computers but data exchange is quite complex. He is a data specialist who is well aware that there are data everywhere but that they are very difficult to access. He then has a rather vague idea, that of a world wide web, a global web of information. He mentions it in a funding request, on the margin of which his boss, Mike Sendall, says “vague but exciting”.
What Tim Bernard-Lee invents is technically not very extraordinary: he makes a language of tags a little simplified so that it is easy to adopt and a rather basic protocol so that a software can access documents. But what it does above all is to formalize the URL, i.e. the fact that a given document has a universal address, and hypertext, the fact that texts can contain a link to other documents. This is what creates the world wide web: it is the fact that documents can be referenced to each other, based on open standards. This openness of the standards allowed the web to impose itself in the early 1990’s compared to other alternatives, now completely forgotten. The World Wide Web quickly took hold in the world of researchers, for whom it was a common documentary space.
And quite quickly the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) was created, which was responsible for these new standards. In particular, it standardized the computer languages HTML and CSS.

We sometimes hear about the semantic web, or web of data, which would be the continuation of the world wide web of the 1990s. What is it about?

Tim Berners-Lee continued to work on the standardization of data and this work gave birth to the semantic web. It is based on a standardization of data representation. All data is described in the form of a triplet: subject, predicate, object. These subjects, predicates and certain objects have the particularity of being referenced by an identifier which is a universal URL. It allows to represent in a unique and universal way an information. So we have a data space where the data has a universal value, independently of who stores it. The web becomes a huge database.
The key standard is RDF (Resource Description Framework). Released in 2004, it allows to describe all web data. But it is not enough to use a universal identifier. It does not solve the question of how to authenticate on a server, how to structure data within a server or how to make requests. So there are dozens of standards that have been published since 2004 by the W3C. All this family of standards is grouped under the name Solid, which allows the implementation of a decentralized web, where users have control over their data, and where applications can access the data wherever they are to get all the value.

Startin’blox technology is based on the SOLID set of standards. Can you tell us a few words about it?

The work of the W3C resulted in 2016 in Solid. From the moment we agree to structure data in compliance with these standards, we see the web differently: on the one hand we have data storage spaces, on the other hand applications that can access them. Any web application can access any data on any server. SOLID is about data structure, data storage, data authentication… Its magic is to consider all these elements to make data accessible by any application.
We have therefore developed a technology that makes it very easy to build applications that respect these standards. An application can therefore connect to the data of all partners who use the same data representation.
Startin’blox makes it very easy to build applications that can access all the data in a data space, promoting collaboration between partners, without requiring a “platform” intermediary to centralize the ecosystem.

The post Startin’blox interviewed Sylvain Le Bon appeared first on Startin'blox.

What can they do with my data?

As we’ve heard 20 times by now, Whatsapp does not collect any deeply private data about me. They can’t access my messages, which are safely encrypted from anyone but my smartphone. They do not keep track of my geolocation, although they know which IP I’m connected from.

What they do know is basically which device I’m using, what have I bought via the app and who I’m interacting with.

What can they do with that?

The truth is that nobody can really answer that question precisely. Knowing which pieces of data are responsible for what marketing magic down the line is a puzzle even the best data-scientists at Facebook would struggle to answer.

What we do know is that it makes it easier to “profile you”, that is to say predict who you are and what you want, so as to tweak their recommendation algorithms both for ads and content.

The positive side of this is that Facebook offers a more engaging experience. Facebook becomes better at showing you content that makes you interact with others via their services and those of their partners. They’ll show you ads that you like, or content that you either love or hate, and you’ll react to it, having social interactions with people and companies in the process.

The downside of it is that they become better at monetizing you. They can skew your information pipeline in a way that makes you more susceptible to being biased. They can make you spend more time or money on things that you would be better off without. It can generally make you more addicted to their apps.

The thing is… you’ll keep using Whatsapp

Tens of millions of users have installed Signal and Telegram over the past few weeks, so much so that it caused outages on their side. If you are reading this line, chances are you’re one of them.

Now the relevant question to ask yourself is: When is it that you will uninstall Whatsapp?

The answer to that question is not in this web. Let me explain it a bit.

Whatsapp has more than 2 billion daily active users. Let’s take a very unlikely hypothesis of 50 million users caring enough about this privacy policy update to uninstall Whatsapp and migrate ALL of their conversations on Signal. That’s 2.5% of Whatsapp’s user base. That means 97.5% of us will stay put, having our conversations on Whatsapp. And because 97.5% of conversations, especially group conversations are on Whatsapp, most Signal newscomers will stay on Whatsapp because of their work group, their family group or the ones on which they were planning their next holidays.

That’s called the network effect, that’s what makes Whatsapp so valuable to Facebook, and that’s why, even if it is a very bad PR move, they know they won’t lose you or their market dominance anytime soon. They are as close as it gets to being a monopoly.

Can we do something about it?

Of course we can! We need to stop storing our private data into private companies. That turns the biggest market player on the web into monopolies.

To work around the problem, our data needs to be stored outside of private companies so that several web players can access it, whereas today, only the biggest player can, only Whatsapp is hosting your family group.

Solid France is an association working on and promoting a new architecture for the web, collaborating with the W3C and the inventor of the web Tim Berners-Lee.

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The web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect—to help people work together―and not as a technical toy.

Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 1999

When you make a phone call, you don’t have to be concerned about the brand of the phone or the telecom provider of the person you are calling. In the same way, sending an email does not require us to worry about the recipient’s email address or email application. All these systems are interoperable, i.e., they are able to communicate with each other.

We consider the interoperability of these communication systems as a given, yet we do not expect interoperability when it comes to Web or mobile applications. Nobody seems surprised to be unable to send messages between WhatsApp and Telegram.

Today, our applications don’t talk to each other. The lack of interoperability has impacts on the Web and the digital economy in general, but also on organizations and their ability to coordinate and cooperate.

This is why Tim Berners-Lee launched the Solid (SOcial LInked Data) project in 2015. Concerned about the growing influence of a few global companies on access to information and personal data, Tim aims to rebuild the technical architecture of the Web based on the principles of decentralization and interoperability.

The Web of Data

To understand this revolution, we need to talk about the Web of Data, a W3C initiative meant to foster the publication of structured data on the Web and to avoid producing data silos that are isolated from each other. The goal of the Web of Data is to connect data, regardless of where it is stored, to form a universal information network.

It is the Semantic Web that enables this linking by providing data with definitions that allow machines to perform contextualized searches. The Semantic Web is based on a language called RDF (Resource Description Framework) which allows the relationships between data to be described in the form of triplets: subject – predicate – object. RDF can use several syntaxes such as XML or JsonLD to represent these relationships.

For example, Bob (subject) likes (predicate) cats (object). The data “Bob” and “cats” are linked together by a qualified relationship called a predicate. These data are themselves described by a web ontology that represents the concepts of “person” and “cat”. Web ontologies contextualize the data using a formal knowledge representation language called OWL, itself based on RDF. Ontologies can describe the set of concepts and relationships between concepts of an entire knowledge domain, for example, the domain of life sciences. It is also possible to create much more specific ontologies relating to a profession, an activity, or an organization.

Once this semantic contextualization of data is established, it is possible to delegate “intelligent” processing to machines, which can then perform logical operations such as inferences.

But data semantization is not everything. There are several implementations of RDF and many different standards, which hinders attempts to reach an international consensus on sensitive issues such as permissions management and authentication.

This is where the Solid project comes in.

The Solid Project

Solid was created by Tim Berners-Lee in 2015 at MIT, and it is now supported by a W3C working group. Solid is an API standard that facilitates interactions between applications based on semantic data. With Solid, it is no longer necessary to develop a specific API for each application in order to access its data, traditionally served by the application’s backend and kept under the control of the company operating it. Instead, users can store their data on “pods”, which are storage points that they control. They can decide where pods are located, move them where they want, and authorize applications to access them. Pods are data sources that are independent of application providers, who no longer need to own the data in order to provide their service.

WebIDs and Pods

WebID is a unique identifier associated with a person or organization. Anyone can host this identifier on their own identity server, or delegate this function to a third-party provider (“WebID provider”). Identity management is based on open standards (FOAF for people and social graphs, OpenID for authentication, Web Access Control for access rights) to maintain interoperability between users, data, and applications, and user independence from the identity provider.

The “pod” refers to the space where a user’s data associated with a WebID is stored, i.e., a person or an organization. Each person can select their pod and WebID providers. The pod provider can be the same as the WebID provider, or they can be distinct.

Taking Back Control of Your Data

The current model of the Web leads to the concentration of power in the hands of centralized actors who provide free services in return for access to our personal data, which they monetize. Google or Facebook, for example, now play the role of identity provider, not only for their own services but also for hundreds of third-party applications. These dominant players collect information about our social activity and our consumption of services and information, far beyond the services they offer themselves.

The intimate knowledge of each person that they gain is a form of extreme surveillance, which can and has been exploited for commercial and political purposes.

Another issue resulting from the loss of control of our own data is that of fragmentation, which we mentioned at the beginning of this article. Since our identity and our data are controlled by companies providing services, it is illusory to expect them to facilitate portability or interoperability with their competitors. For example, our Deezer playlist will be unusable on Spotify, our reputation as a driver will only be promoted at BlaBlaCar, and the social graph of our friends and acquaintances will remain the property of Facebook.

Finally, the hyper-concentration of web applications leads to a uniform user experience. Some applications are used by hundreds of millions, even billions of people, due to network effects favoring global monopolies. Freeing up access to data (while respecting people’s rights) would enable a burgeoning explosion of social and collaborative applications, with each community – and even each individual – able to have an interface adapted to their needs.

Solid is radically changing the architecture of Web applications in favor of the autonomy of individuals, who regain sole control of their identity and data. Far from being just a technical change, Solid could profoundly transform the digital economy to the detriment of models based on the massive exploitation of user data.

With Solid, the success of a project can no longer be based on capturing and retaining data in order to extract economic value. The challenge becomes the intelligent utilization of this data in order to provide a relevant service to a now emancipated user.

Solid and Organizations

It’s easy to imagine Solid’s emancipatory potential for individual users, consumers, and citizens, but what about organizations? Does the distributed web model proposed by Tim Berners-Lee also have virtues for companies? Can it help to enhance cooperation between them?

Let’s take the case of a large organization with branches in different regions or countries. In general, software solutions supporting collaboration between the different levels of the organization and with external parties are selected, developed, configured, and deployed centrally by the IT department. IT people must take into account a very large array of factors and engage in complex, lengthy, and often uncertain projects in order to satisfy the needs of their users. Meanwhile, people at the local level, on the edge of the organization, are hampered by unsuitable tools, or mobilize “shadow IT”, i.e., solutions that respond to local needs but increase silos and security risks.

Today, it is widely accepted that the performance and resilience of organizations depend on the autonomy granted to operational teams, capable of reacting rapidly to local demands and constraints. The modular enterprise model, for example, which gives teams, departments, or BUs a great deal of latitude in terms of action and decision-making, requires the decentralization of information and cooperation processes. Agility requires empowering every component of complex organizational systems. But then, how can the overall coherence of the organization be maintained?

Another profound transformation affecting organizations of all sizes relates to open innovation and cooperative and collaborative processes within ecosystems. The pooling of R&D between public and private sectors, synergies between corporates and start-ups, and cooperation within industrial sectors or supply chains are all areas where the centralization of information systems is counterproductive.

Finally, the so-called “sharing economy” is another area that should gain from decentralization and interoperability. The term covers very diverse and not always positive realities, from digital labor to work done by swarms of pseudo-self-employed workers. But it also names a deep transformation of the nature of work, and the transition from labor to work as described by Laetitia Vitaud in her latest book. The rapid growth of independent work goes hand in hand with new solidarities within workers’ collectives and networks, which can pool resources without sacrificing their members’ autonomy. Here too, traditional monolithic tools are unsuitable, and the need for interoperability between autonomous parties is obvious.

Solid sets the conditions for better coordination between peers, whether they are freelancers, collectives, agencies, or large companies. Data exchange is based on the flexible interoperability framework of the Web of Data, rather than on a rigid data schema and the standardization of applications.

Two French projects have taken up the challenge of bringing this vision into reality.

The Virtual Assembly is a non-profit ecosystem of actors who develop digital commons (open source tools, methods, and projects) based on the Semantic Web and Solid, available to everyone.

The Startin’blox cooperative offers an open-source solution to create Web applications by assembling Solid components, as simply as one can create a website with WordPress.

The first application based on the Startin’Blox framework, Hubl, showcases how it can improve interoperability between organizations and workers’ collectives. Hubl offers modules such as an instant messaging system, a job board, a profile directory, and so on. Each collective of freelancers can decide which modules they implement and which data they wish to share. It is now possible to interconnect collectives and freelancers within an ecosystem, without a platform dictating its rules to the participants or using its position to extract economic rent!

Like Web3 applications based on blockchain technology, Solid’s Distributed Web promotes the autonomy of individuals while heralding considerable potential for transformation within organizations and ecosystems.

Despite its current lack of visibility, its adoption could prove rapid thanks to a reliable technological base… and the response it provides to the obvious needs of many social and economic players.

– – –

This article was originally written by Alice Poggioli and Philippe Honigman and published on Hackernoon.

Thanks to Rémi Arnaud, Sylvain Le Bon, Guillaume Rouyer, and the Startin’Blox community for their contributions. Thanks to Kirstin Maulding for her precious help with the translation.

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Cooperative associations are fundamentally different from libraries and schools. Students go to school to access knowledge; cooperative associations come to entrepreneurs to share knowledge from other entrepreneurs. Consequently, Coopedia is not much about aggregating documentation on a cooperative association’s website: it aims to bring knowledge to communities of practice.

Today’s communication strategies are about attracting entrepreneurs to our websites. What about reversing the process? How about displaying a resource directly on the apps used by entrepreneurs to coordinate their communities and manage their business? How powerful would become a cooperative development resource shown at the right time to the right person? Although Coopedia is setting a first cornerstone, such a vision goes beyond the deployment and multiplication of decentralized knowledge bases.

Coopedia is based on Solid standards. Designed by the World Wide Web Consortium, Solid standards set the stage for a fair and decentralized web. Solid standards’s key added value is to make interoperability universal. When two systems are interoperable, they are able to exchange data. Today, interoperability enables you to compare flight ticket fares, and book a trip involving different airlines companies; it also enables Google Maps to indicate your next train departure and inform you about delays.
However, until now, making two systems become interoperable has been extremely expensive, and reserved to large players: this is why Google Maps suggests you Uber rather than your local taxi coop. Solid breaks the costs of interoperability: any Solid-based application can be interconnected with any other Solid-based application. No matter how rich or powerful you are, if interconnecting your system with a partner’s system is relevant, you can interconnect. Voilà.

Now, imagine the power of a Coopedia interconnected with its ecosystem of cooperative applications. Sarah and Mike just founded a freelancer cooperative: to manage their coop, they deployed a Solid-based cloud for sharing documents among their members. The model is successful, but the founders remain unsatisfied: they now want to foster innovation and empowerment within their coop.
In a matter of minutes, Sarah connected their cloud with Coopedia: she set filters so that only documents written in English, and addressing innovation within freelance coops would appear on their internal cloud. Now, by accessing their regular collaborative tools, freelancers see and access stimulating, up-to-date and relevant resources designed to stimulate collective creativity.

By using universal Solid standards, Coopedia web app aims to make data (and knowledge) flow well beyond current capabilities — and even imaginations. Untapping its full potential requires the creation of a wide ecosystem of interoperable apps, designed by people aware about the enormous potential of knowledge-sharing. Let’s build and connect!

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