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).
I have infrastructure (my own fully private small colo) and a vested permanent commercial interest in an open exchange/aggregator or whatever this is called.
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 .
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. 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