What is Solid Forum?
The Solid project has a protocol, a community, and a growing ecosystem of deployments. What it doesn’t have is a structured, inclusive way to surface what the community thinks should happen next. Forum threads are noisy. GitHub issues track implementation, not strategy. The weekly community calls reach a fraction of the people who care.
Solid Forum is a deliberation tool — modelled on vTaiwan’s process, which has shaped 20+ pieces of legislation in Taiwan — that lets anyone in the Solid community write short statements about the project’s direction, vote on others’ statements, and see where consensus and disagreement actually lie.
The difference: it runs on Solid. Your contributions live in your pod. You control who can read them, and you can take them with you.
How to participate
Log in with your Solid identity
Use your existing WebID from any Solid provider — solidcommunity.net, solidweb.org, your own CSS instance, or any provider that supports Solid-OIDC. Don’t have one? You can create a pod in under a minute.
Write a statement
Short, clear positions on the topic under deliberation. “WAC should remain the default access control mechanism.” “The community needs an official Python SDK.” “Solid Notifications should be the next spec priority.” No character limit, but the best statements are one or two sentences.
Vote on others’ statements
Agree, disagree, or pass. There is no reply button. This is deliberate — it prevents threads from becoming arguments and rewards statements that build bridges across groups.
See where the community stands
A live visualisation clusters participants by voting pattern. You’ll see which statements have broad consensus, which are divisive, and which groups exist within the community. No names — just positions.
Everything you write is stored in your Solid pod as linked data. The forum reads it with your permission. If you revoke access, your contributions disappear from the forum — because they were never on our server to begin with.
The deliberation process
Solid Forum follows the four-stage process pioneered by vTaiwan, adapted for the Solid community at the Symposium:
Propose
At the hackathon (April 27–29), we seed the forum with the questions the community is already debating. Anyone can submit a topic.
Opine
During the symposium (April 30 – May 1), participants write statements and vote. The forum is open to anyone with a WebID — not just attendees.
Reflect
An AI assistant summarises the emerging consensus and points of disagreement. The summary is published as linked data in a shared pod — auditable, attributable, and forkable.
Decide
Results are presented at the symposium. The Solid community — spec editors, implementers, deployers — sees where the broader community actually stands.
Possible topics for the Symposium
- What should be the next specification priority for Solid?
- Should WAC or ACP be the recommended access control mechanism?
- How should the community approach interoperability with EU Data Spaces?
- What does “achieving adoption at scale” actually require?
- How should Solid engage with AI agent frameworks?
These are starting points. The community proposes the real agenda.
Why build this on Solid?
Eat your own cooking
The Solid community discusses its future on GitHub, Discourse, Matrix, and mailing lists — none of which run on Solid. If the protocol is ready for real applications, it should be ready for this one. If it isn’t, we’ll find out by trying.
Your data, your pod
On a traditional forum, your posts belong to the platform operator. On Solid Forum, your statements live in your pod. You grant the forum read access. You can revoke it. You can take your contributions to a different aggregator, or analyse them yourself.
Linked data all the way down
Every statement, every vote, every consensus summary is stored as RDF. The forum’s output isn’t a thread — it’s a queryable knowledge graph of what the Solid community thinks. It can be analysed, visualised, and built upon by anyone.
Inclusive by default
You don’t need to attend the Symposium to participate. You don’t need to be in the weekly call. Anyone with a WebID can write a statement and vote. The forum is open before, during, and after the event.
How it works
For participants
You open the forum in your browser. You log in with your Solid identity (the same WebID you use for any Solid app). You see the current topic and a stream of statements from other participants. You write your own, vote on others, and watch the consensus map update in real time.
Behind the scenes, every statement you write is a small RDF document stored in your pod. You grant the forum’s aggregator read access. Your votes are stored the same way. Nothing touches our server that doesn’t come from your pod with your permission.
For the forum
What’s stored in your pod
| Resource | What it contains | Who can read it |
|---|---|---|
/forum/statements/ |
Your written statements, each as an RDF document | The forum aggregator (you grant access) |
/forum/votes/ |
Your agree/disagree/pass votes on others’ statements | The forum aggregator (you grant access) |
The forum aggregator never stores your data. It reads from pods in real time. The consensus map and AI summary are written to a shared public pod — the community’s collective output, owned by no individual.
The technology
| Component | Technology |
|---|---|
| Authentication | Solid-OIDC + DPoP via the people SDK (browser auth code flow with PKCE) |
| Statement storage | RDF in participant pods, written via pod.create() |
| Access control | WAC grants — participants grant the aggregator Read access |
| Real-time updates | Solid Notifications (WebSocket channel) via NotificationStream |
| Consensus clustering | Polis-style opinion grouping from voting patterns |
| AI summary | Claude reads the aggregate (not individual pods) and summarises consensus |
| Visualisation | D3.js consensus map in the browser |
| Pod hosting | Community Solid Server |
Inspired by
vTaiwan
The deliberation process that shaped 20+ laws: propose, opine, reflect, decide. Uses Polis for opinion clustering with no reply button — rewards bridging statements over arguments. 80% of proposals were acted on by the government. We adopt the same four-stage process and the same interaction design.
Athumi
Europe’s first data utility company: 6.5M citizens with Solid pods. Proves the protocol works at national scale for citizen-controlled data. Our forum uses the same Solid infrastructure for community-controlled deliberation data.
Alignment Assemblies
Audrey Tang + Collective Intelligence Project + Anthropic + OpenAI. Hundreds of thousands of citizens invited to co-create AI governance guidelines. Right Livelihood Award 2025. Demonstrates that structured public deliberation works at scale with AI assistance.
Sovereign Graphs
This project draws on a literature review prepared for The Institutional Architecture Lab, examining how governments are using federated knowledge graphs for institutional memory — from Estonia’s X-Road to GAIA-X.
Paper
Solid Forum: Sovereign Deliberation for the Solid Community
A brief paper explaining why the Solid community should govern its own development with the tools it builds — and how vTaiwan’s deliberation process, combined with Solid’s data sovereignty protocol, makes this possible.
About
Solid Forum is a hackathon project by
Pacific,
built on people —
the open-source (MIT) Python SDK for the Solid Project.
The forum is a gift to the community. The code is open source. The data belongs to the participants. The output belongs to everyone.
If this is useful, it should outlive the hackathon. If it isn’t, we’ll have learned something about what Solid still needs. Either way, the community wins.