The last decade has witnessed quantum mechanics and information science merge for the debut of experimental quantum information processing. Despite the number of promising physical systems as candidates for quantum bits, scalability via a brute force approach faces serious technical obstacles. Developing distributed quantum networks is possibly the answer to the stringent demand of controllable interaction between high quality qubits. In these systems, the requirements are on the stationary qubits – they need to be both isolated and accessible. The requirements on the flying qubits are that they need to be of reproducibly high quality, identical, and also they need to be able to interface well with the stationary qubits. We propose to realize an operational distributed solid-state quantum network relying on confined spins in quantum dots as qubits connected via a shared optical interconnection net used via single photons as flying qubits. Key milestones include high fidelity distant spin entanglement generation, implementation of spin entanglement purification, and formation of spin-photon hybrid cluster states in order to perform one-way quantum computation protocols with incorporated memory. Significant efforts will be devoted in tandem for the grand challenge of efficient in/out coupling of light in these systems with initial investigations suggest efficiencies approaching unity can be achieved within the proposed timeline.