Andrei Sambra - MIT/W3C

Re-decentralize the Web

Centralization <-> Decentralization

Centralization is bad!

Source:  http://lionbridge.com

Source:  http://www.theeconomist.com/

Source:  http://www.idgconnect.com/

Vendor lock-in

A pig on a farm gets free food, shelter and health care.

If you're not paying, you're the product!

Source: http://wikimedia.org/

* published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2014 
Photo: Matt & Jessica Zollmann (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Data abuse / google bombing

"The search engine manipulation effect (SEME) and its possible impact on the outcomes of elections."* -- Robert Epstein and Ronald E. Robertson

• biased search rankings can shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20% or more
• the shift can be much higher in some demographic groups
• such rankings can be masked so that people show no awareness of the manipulation

Source:  http://siemens.com

Source: https://brium.me

What can we do?

1. User-centricity

2. Decouple everything

Now (before)

After

3. Re-decentralized services

3. Re-decentralized services

3. Peer-to-Peer services

What do we stand to gain?

New business models

Governance & Democracy

Source: https://www.atlassian.com

Ability to add new features

Source: http://npr.org/

Source:  https://moz.com

Keep your social graph

Source: http://www.quitsmoking.com/

Now what?

Solid - Social Linked Data

Three main principles:

Decouple everything

Build a generic platform + tools

Standardize as much as possible

So far we've worked on:

Identity

Authentication

Access control

RESTful data API

...but

https://github.com/solid/

Source: http://helpwiththetoughquestions.com/