woutermont
commented
2 years ago Personally, as a Solid library and application developer, some of the main hurdles of engaging with the panel(s) are
- having not enough time to follow up on all the panels, repos, issues, fora, channels etc. next to actual developing; and
- input having no effect, since a first consensus seems mostly to have been reached very early on already (and assuming a certain level of intimacy with the discussed concepts for better or worse seems to imply assuming better insight than people with less time to follow up).
Also, there is a.f.a.i.k. no easy way to figure out why past decisions were made. Neither meeting notes, nor issue listings, nor gitter channels read or search very well. Apart from anecdotal summaries from people who were somehow involved, there seems to be no way to get an overview of which pros and cons were the rationale for a decision. This of course perpetuates the fact that some people have (increasingly) more intimacy with the subjects.
acoburn
KyraAssaad
jeff-zucker
MarrelleBailey
As discussed during a meeting, it would be interesting for the panel to enable more community engagement. Regular meetings should carry on as they are, because it makes it much easier to discuss about specification matters assuming a certain level of intimacy with the discussed concepts.
However, part of the specification success will come from its high-level understanding by the developers who create solid applications, and them being okay about the constraints coming from the specification. As pointed out during the meeting, some of that discussion will happen at the library level, and the library implementers (me being one of them) will be able to collect some feedback and bring it back in a condensed form to the panel. It seems that it would still be beneficial to establish a more direct communication between the community (not restricted to the developers) and the panel.
One way of doing so would be to dedicate some time (e.g. one monthly session) to Q&A with the community. This would inform a potential primer with what people expect, potentially collect use cases, and generally help shared understanding of authentication issues in Solid. Such sessions could (and in my opinion, should) be announced in advance on the forum and Gitter channels, so that we can prepare to answer some questions, for instance by creating some pedagogic support that could be later reused. For instance, I created a while ago some slides to talk about some aspects of Solid (for instance during a n academic winter school, and I'd be happy to update them/create additional animations around topics discussed.
Do you agree this is something we could give a shot at, and do you have additional/alternative suggestions on how we should approach this ? Also, I'd be interested in the opinion of some members of the DEI panel, which could have very interesting insight on making these sessions as accessible as possible (@MarrelleBailey, @KyraAssaad, @jeff-zucker ?)