Anyone want to work together on spinning up a non profit replacement with governance that prohibits a transfer of ownership to a for profit entity?
1) What will participants get out of it?
2) How will you pay for the central services used?
3) Where there isn't enough volunteer labor, how will you pay for needed labor?
I don't want to discourage anybody, but there are some hard sustainability problems there.
(FWIW I'm happy to chat: have sold non-ADSB aviation data and consulting before and been involved with buying ADSB and AIS from a commercial provider)
Do you have a sense of where some good dividing lines are between what to give to the general public, what contributors get, and what is marketable?
As an example, AISHub data contributors get a free real-time stream of global data in the same format that comes out of an AIS receiver. They also get limited API access: https://www.aishub.net/api
On top of that, the company that runs AISHub sells both software and data services: http://www.astrapaging.com/data-services
Potentially a lot of the value comes from providing specific cuts of the data for specific purposes to companies (statistics on aircraft hours and cycles for companies supplying parts and maintenance, trend analysis). There are of course already authoritative sources that specialise in that, but they're relatively expensive, and a lot of the commercial customers want Excel files with prepared data tables for their commercial use, not API access to a stream that probably needs some cleaning up. Selling that value add stuff is compatible with making the core data streams open. The rest obviously comes from API access (which you'd likely want to limit to some extent so consumer web and mobile apps aren't hammering them for data)
Marketability is going to depend a huge amount on whether it's possible to get enough people on board to get good coverage, bearing in mind there are plenty of ADS-B data aggregation services out there (and they tend to have historical data going back several years, with the more commercially oriented ones having sales teams and full service customer support)
1. The same they got out of ADS-B Exchange: open aviation data. I would work with the Internet Archive to archive batches of the data stream on a cadence. We should never be able to take historical data away. It is yours, forever.
2. I would pay for a dedicated server out of my pocket to bootstrap, with the eventual goal of accumulating enough donations to have a very small non profit investment account that would throw off just enough returns to pay for the server(s) or a rack of equipment at a colo indefinitely (I’m partial to Hurricane Electric but any reasonable priced vendor will do). Again, strong governance around this as a US non profit to demonstrate transparency and efficiency. I would also accept equipment, colo, and bandwidth donations from folks who could ensure consistency, quality, and continuity of the resource.
3. We would rely primarily on volunteers, similar to OpenStreetMap, who runs lean fiscally speaking [1]. The Internet Archive runs their servers for 5-7 years (per u/jonah-archive's ops talk), so I would shoot for a long bare metal depreciation schedule, a time series database stored in Backblaze B2, high level just an efficient use of capital for the technology components. I suppose I'm going back into an on call rotation. C'est la vie. Automate All The Things.
Poke holes in my thoughts, that's how they improve. I would also be interested in expanding into the AIS space; it's all UDP packets from SDRs coming into a software router and logger (with a visualization and admin frontend).
I'd be interested to see if the Internet Archive wants large globs of this kind of data. I actually have something like 5 years of AIS data that I've been collecting and I'd be happy to contribute it.
I totally agree with you on transparency and efficiency.
Taking donations is a chancy model. People get excited up front, but ongoing expenses requires ongoing begging unless you get really lucky with the amount of money raised up front. And even then, as Wikipedia shows, people tend to get ideas about using the money to do more stuff. As someone else suggested, a revenue-driven model might be more sustainable.
The co-op I helped run was Bandwagon. We rented a cabinet and then shared it out among a bunch of sysadmins who wanted their own boxes on the internet. This started circa 2001, when single-box hosting was rare and virtual hosting was nonexistent. We wound it up a few years ago as most of the people moved to the cloud.
My experience is that people's motivations change over time, and so actually owning hardware is risky if you want to avoid the one-person-in-Nebraska problem. [1]
Charles@turnsys.com for anyone who is serious about this.
My commercial interest is a free software / hardware (with itar exception) high altitude balloon startup that I’m the CTO/founder of .
That said, I can also think of a few ways you might be able to structure a successor that can’t exit like this, without having to deal with the headache of qualification and compliance as a non-profit. Interesting thought exercise.