Even today, colonialism assumes new forms. It no longer dominates only bodies, but appropriates data, transforming personal lives into exploitable information. … Here lies one of the most urgent moral challenges of our time: to ensure that shared knowledge becomes a true common good rather than an instrument of dominance. This requires restoring to individuals not only the data that describes them, but also the ability to decide how it is used, by whom and for whose benefit. Otherwise, the digital age will not be post-colonial, but colonial in another form.
We take this opportunity to acknowledge the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as the First Peoples and Traditional Custodians of the lands and waterways of Australia. We pay our respects to ancestors and Elders, past and present. As part of the Australian National University community we thank the traditional custodians on whose land we live, work and play, and particularly the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people of the Canberra region.
Solid is an open standard for servers supporting social linked data. Pods, or personal online data stores, are your data stores in the cloud. Your data is stored securely and privately under your control, and you decide with whom and when you share your data. No more locking your data up with big tech without your control and say so. It is time for us all to benefit from the economic and societal outcomes of the digital and AI age.
Our research and development team at the Software Innovation Institute (SII) of the Australian National University has developed new technology to support the development of applications storing their data in Solid Pods. Our collection of useful and privacy-first applications can host data on any Solid server, world-wide. Many servers offer free layer for you to explore the technology. As your data needs increase or if you need commercially managed hosting, then you can migrate to other plans and servers, anywhere in the world.
Key features of this new focus on your data in your hands include:
Since 2020 we have run many trials, including with our indigenous communities, multiple sclerosis society, and mental health care device manufacturers. In addition to our foundation libraries supporting app developers, we have nearly 20 productivity and self support apps freely available for anyone to try out.
The ANU Software Innovation Institute works to spread these capabilities freely, for anyone to build upon, to support our humanity world wide. Our open-source solidpod and solidui packages for Flutter are the foundations for many Solid Pod apps.
Contact UsRecent research articles, publications, and projects from the ANU Software Innovation Institute on decentralised data, privacy-first infrastructure, and Solid POD technology.
The App Showcase allows you to immediately run any of our apps within your browser without having to install anything (you will need to have registered for your own Pod though). We have many Solid apps published, like the randomly chosen example app below. More are in development. Our apps are written in Flutter and so run on any platform.
We have published packages to the Flutter/Dart repository pub.dev to support quickly building Flutter-based Solid apps. Our packages (libraries) include solidui and solidpod.
Claude Code can be used to build a solidui based flutter app almost immediately. You can find sample code and contribute to our open development by visiting our github repositories anusii and gjwgit.
Our apps are written in Flutter. They are all published as open source. Being written in Flutter they run on any platform. You can try them out in the browser (tap the run button as you hover over a particular app) or install them on your device from the installers available from the installers. Tap of the folder icon for each app to visit the app github home. We are also working toward publishing them on the Google Play Store for Android and on Snapcraft for GNU/Linux. They are not all there yet, but keep an eye out for them.
Here are some frequenty asked questions about Solid Pods, the technology behind it, and specific apps. Note that the following is only a very high level defintion of the technology. If you wish to learn much more take a look at the Solid Project AU Website
Solid (Social linked data) is a server API specification that lets individuals and groups store their data securely in decentralised Data Vaults storing user PODs (Personal Online Datastores). PODs are secure web based data stores for different data types. When data is stored in a POD, its owners control the people and applications that can access it. For details visit the Solid Project Solid Project
We are keen to connect with other developers in Australia developing Solid Pod technology and apps, ideally as open source software. Please contact us if you would like to play a role in the future of data or if you have an app that you would like listed here.
Lead by Professor Graham Williams, Chief Scientist of the Software Innovation Institute (SII) of the Australian National University (ANU), we are developing new privacy-first technology to support app development using the Flutter/Dart ecosystem. With a focus on open-source software and a culture of sharing, all of our package and app development is freely available for anyone to use and build on. Please get in touch if you would like to collaborate with us.
Software Innovation Institute, the Australian National University
Software Innovation Institute, the Australian National University
Software Innovation Institute, the Australian National University
Software Innovation Institute, the Australian National University
Software Innovation Institute, the Australian National University
Software Innovation Institute, the Australian National University
To know more about our project or to get involved in app development drop us a message.
108 North Road, Australian National University, Acton ACT 2601, Australia
SolidCommunity@togaware.com
