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]
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/