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I run an AIS receiver and have previously run a technical co-op. I am happy to chat, although I don't have time to do much direct labor right now. But the first

I run an AIS receiver and have previously run a technical co-op. I am happy to chat, although I don't have time to do much direct labor right now. But the first questions I'd want to answer: 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.

andiareso 4y ago
I'm interested in helping as well (software engineer). This is such a loss for the community. Like other's have stated, ADS-B exchange didn't have to follow the privacy requests as they didn't aggregate FAA data so it remained open. I'm wondering what the future will hold with the new ownership.
notahacker 4y ago
Depending on what sort of commercial arrangements participants were happy with, the obvious fundraising options are selling value added services or derived data on top or classic FOSS 'sponsorship' with corporate partners (hard to get for a new project in this space). That doesn't guarantee sustainability of course, particularly with there being a lot of competition in this sector with good coverage already. (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)
- wpietri 4y ago
  Having been both on the buy and sell side is a very valuable perspective to include. 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 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 http://www.astrapaging.com/data-services
  - notahacker 4y ago
    Dividing lines would depend to a large extent on what contributors want, particularly if it's set to be a nonprofit with a FOSS ethos. 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)
    - wpietri 4y ago
      Thanks! That's a useful portrait of the landscape.
toomuchtodo 4y ago
Great questions. I have never run a non profit myself (but run several small business ventures, real estate investments, have previously owned and sold a small technology company), but view it as an optimal structure to support technology services like this that are intended as a public good or utility versus something that is going to get flipped to someone that is going to extract the value out of it (investors like PE and similar). I want to build where there can be no rug pull for stakeholders. 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). [1] https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Finances https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Finances
- wpietri 4y ago
  Great starter thoughts! Thanks for contributing them. 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] [1] https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/

andiareso 4y ago

I'm interested in helping as well (software engineer). This is such a loss for the community. Like other's have stated, ADS-B exchange didn't have to follow the privacy requests as they didn't aggregate FAA data so it remained open. I'm wondering what the future will hold with the new ownership.

notahacker 4y ago

Depending on what sort of commercial arrangements participants were happy with, the obvious fundraising options are selling value added services or derived data on top or classic FOSS 'sponsorship' with corporate partners (hard to get for a new project in this space). That doesn't guarantee sustainability of course, particularly with there being a lot of competition in this sector with good coverage already. (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)

wpietri 4y ago
Having been both on the buy and sell side is a very valuable perspective to include. 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 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 http://www.astrapaging.com/data-services
- notahacker 4y ago
  Dividing lines would depend to a large extent on what contributors want, particularly if it's set to be a nonprofit with a FOSS ethos. 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)
  - wpietri 4y ago
    Thanks! That's a useful portrait of the landscape.

toomuchtodo 4y ago

Great questions. I have never run a non profit myself (but run several small business ventures, real estate investments, have previously owned and sold a small technology company), but view it as an optimal structure to support technology services like this that are intended as a public good or utility versus something that is going to get flipped to someone that is going to extract the value out of it (investors like PE and similar). I want to build where there can be no rug pull for stakeholders. 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). [1] https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Finances https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Finances

wpietri 4y ago
Great starter thoughts! Thanks for contributing them. 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] [1] https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/