Hi everyone,
I wanted to gauge reaction to the following in regards to the TTN Manifesto and whether it could make sense to offer some variation on it - perhaps a risky question to raise, but I feel its with the best possible intent, so here goes...
The TTN Manifesto is great, offering free access to an IoT data collection infrastructure for pretty much any purpose as long as its legal. You don't have to participate in providing infrastructure in order to take benefit from its existence. In fact, you could in principle run a commercial service off it and contribute nothing back to TTN, even though TTN provides no guaranteed SLA. In my discussions with people in my local context this causes a bit of an issue, why should I support the infrastructure providing gateways for free if others are simply going to make money off the back of it?
A fair enough question I think... where is the quid pro quo or reciprocation in participation?
My response is to suggest that perhaps in order for you to make use of TTN for purposes other than providing social good or a free publicly accessible application consuming sensor/Node generated data, then you should be required to make the data that you have collected/processed with yours/others' sensors through the infrastructure available as Open Data. Now it may be appropriate for this data to be filtered somewhat or subject to some embargo time delay (allowing the commercial service to be real-time and remain competitive), but still you'd be contributing something back to the community as a whole, i.e. some aspect of your data whether raw or subsequently processed.
What do others think about this Open Data proposal?
Connected to this is the issue of determining whether a sensor/Node or Application using TTN is commercially based. Should this be part of its registration with TTN when it obtains its globally unique identifiers? And should this then be something gateways and server infrastructure can filter and reroute traffic based on? I can certainly generate situations where these aspects of registration and control are important both to Gateway owners and the Application creators themselves...
Be interested to hear what others think?