4 ms·

Depending on what sort of commercial arrangements participants were happy with, the obvious fundraising options are selling value added services or derived data

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.

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.