Data
Your data, where it belongs.
OpenXP runs on two open standards. Our experience specification and file format describes the experience. Solid, begun by the inventor of the web, holds the data. One rule connects them: data lives with whoever owns it.
Data lives with its owner: the creator’s work in a pod they control (live), the organisation’s estate in a pod they own (live), and — next — the guest’s memories in a pod they take home.
The principle
Data lives with whoever owns it.
Solid is an open web standard begun by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web. The idea is simple: your data lives in a pod — a personal store you control — and applications come to the data, rather than swallowing it. OpenXP applies that idea wherever data has a clear owner, and deliberately nowhere else.
Operations
conventional infrastructureAccounts, roles, billing, monitoring, audit. This runs on conventional, proven infrastructure — no novelty where reliability is the whole point.
The work
organisation podExperiences, scenes, assets — the creative estate. Commissioned work belongs to the organisation, so it can live in a pod the organisation owns.
The person
personal podDrafts, preferences, working copies. A creator’s own material lives in a pod only they control — on their machine, or with any provider they choose.
The guest
// nextThe memories an experience creates. Our direction: they leave in a pod the guest takes home — not in a venue database.
Four kinds of data, four owners, four stores. The discipline is in never confusing them — an organisation’s books are not a creator’s sketchbook, and neither belongs to us.
Shipping now
Where this works today.
This is not a whitepaper position. Pods are how the tools store creative work now.
XP Studio
Saves your work to a pod you control. By default the pod runs on your own machine; you can point it at any Solid-compliant provider, or use a managed pod when you work as a team.
XP Bridge
Opens and saves experiences from a pod the way you’d use a file location — explicit, versioned, and safe against conflicting edits.
XP Cloud
Provides organisation pods: the team’s shared estate and each member’s workspace, with roles and access control — and sync between a member’s own pod and their workspace.
The split earns its keep when people move on.
When an engagement ends, the organisation keeps its estate, and the person keeps their pod — their own work, preferences and working copies intact. Nothing to untangle, and nobody’s data held by the other side. That is what storing data with its owner buys you, and it works in both directions.
The road ahead
Next: the guest takes it home.
These foundations exist to support the next evolution for the personalisation of experiences.
The souvenir, completed
Every memorable experience ends the same way: mark the moment, capture it, hand it back. Guest pods complete the last step — the photograph, the recording, the achievement, delivered into a store the guest owns and takes home. Not an account on the venue’s books; a keepsake that belongs to the person it happened to.
Personalisation, by invitation
A returning guest who already has a pod can offer it: the experience reads only what they choose to share, and shapes itself around them — the right language, the right intensity, a story that remembers their last visit. No venue account, no tracking, and the invitation can be withdrawn as easily as it was given.
Privacy with teeth
Every OpenXP experience file already declares each piece of guest data as transient, scoped, or retained. Each declaration carries a purpose and a lawful basis. Guest pods give “retained” its best possible answer: retained by the guest.
One rule we hold ourselves to: guests will never need to know what a pod is. “Take your memories home” is the experience; how they are held is our job, not theirs.
Our stance
Why we chose Solid?
It is a statement of intent. An open platform should make it visibly easy to take your data and go — not as a slogan, but as architecture. We build that in on purpose, and we accept everything it implies.
It is infrastructure freedom. Creators already choose where their pods live. For organisations, the architecture is built so an estate can sit on infrastructure they run — or with an enterprise Solid provider — rather than only on ours.
Solid is built on open web standards. HTTP, identity, access control — from the people who built the web the first time.
OpenXP is Solid, applied: pods behind real creative work, for creators and organisations today — and for guests next. If you work on open data standards, we would like to compare notes.