First EWADA/Solid Seminar at Oxford CS

Following a very sucessful Solid workshop in March, we are very excited to have Prof. Sir Nigel Shadbolt, Prof. Sir. Tim Berners-Lee and Prof. Ruben Verborgh to host a public seminar for our CS students on 23 May 2023 in the Wolfson Building.

The seminar was well attended by our undergradudates, postgradudates as well as DPhil students. We started with Nigel giving an exciting introduction about the vision of the EWADA project and the critial role of web decentralisation in today's platform-driven ecosystem. This was followed by an in-depth presentation about the evolution of the Web protocols, from Web 1.0, Web 3.0 to the Solid-based ecosystem by Tim. Prof. Verborgh concluded the seminar with an exciting discussion about how the decentralised architecture and Solid-related technologies are being used in real settings.

The second part of the seminar opened the floor to questions from the audience. It was extremely encouraging to see how some students have already started to consider the social technical challenges related to a decentralised web architecture and how this seminar has enabled them to be more aware of open web technologies to support the vision of data autonomy for our society.

We have been very fortunate to have Tim to open the workshop and provide the introduction about Solid. It has been amazing to see how Tim walked through the beginning of Web 1.0, to the journey from Web 2.0 (the social web) to the so-called Web3.0 (the decentralised web), and how the stack of standard protocols underpinning these technologies have made it possible for us to have an open and interoperable World Wide Web.