ClarissaDeWi
commented
2 years ago Hello again @jcronyn 👋 Thanks for submitting another grant proposal. Our team is taking a closer look and will respond in the next two weeks.
Open jcronyn opened 2 years ago
ClarissaDeWi
commented
2 years ago Hello again @jcronyn 👋 Thanks for submitting another grant proposal. Our team is taking a closer look and will respond in the next two weeks.
Project:
Opensource Hosting Management Platform
Elevator Pitch:
Individuals and organizations currently have a small selection of provider solutions for managing hosting hotspots. These tools are not free and current community tooling is a prohibitive factor for those interested in investing in hotspots to provide to hosts. Starting a hosting company already requires significant startup costs such as incorporation, legal, asset purchases, etc. Having access to opensource, free community tooling with which to contribute to edge network growth will further enable providers and accelerate growth.
Not having a community-provided tool to help manage the running of a host company reduces investment interest. The small number of non-free tools have no pressure to increase the reliability or breadth of their feature set, as there is no open source, community alternative. Current platforms store private data, have poor performance/uptime, and have limited options for data export (if export works at all). Centralizing hosts to one of a handful of private platforms is bad for the longevity of host companies and thus the community. We seek to enable more people to participate and control their own data. A sudden change in pricing or lost access to existing market options can have a critical negative impact on the viability of hotspot hosting.
We will build an opensource hosting platform that is easy to run, easy to extend, open-sourced, and fully featured. This will allow individuals providing new, valuable coverage to have access to the tools they need to run their burgeoning fleets without having to pay for the basic services required to manage assets, hosts, payments, taxes, and other basic concerns. As the tool will be stewarded by the community and open source, features can be enhanced in a way that provides value to everyone.
Total fiat/hnt ask:
$87,500
Name and Address:
Crypto Balloon LLC - 3712 Ringgold Road #185, Chattanooga, TN 37412
Team or Project website:
https://www.cryptoballoon.net
Code Repos of team or key applicants:
Crypto Balloon LLC
Joe Cronyn
Joshua Miller
Project Details:
The Helium community and it's continued growth is, to a large extent, supported by individuals and businesses that run hosting companies. We have a strong desire to create an open-source tool that is free to use, sensitive to user privacy, and provides the tools that these entities need to be able to successfully manage their hotspot fleets and grow the network.
We will develop an opensource application that can be run and will allow a variety of providers to self-manage their hosting assets, hosts, payments, profitability, taxes, and other facets of hotspot hosting management. This platform can serve as a base for a competitive platform-as-a-service offerings, as well as being a free solution for technically-inclined (or adequately motivated) parties.
The final deliverable for this project will be a Python based application that meets the following criteria.
We have used Django to deploy many sites to production - serving anything from technology asset and supply chain management to high-volume e-commerce and marketing. Django provides a platform that is extremely well-engineered and allows for the development of a site that can support multi-tenancy, customized branding, extensions/add-ons, i18n, etc. with ease. This mature and well-documented architecture along with our track record of delivering Django sites makes this the perfect choice for a significant platform like this. Clients will be able to customize back-end functionality such as authentication, databases, caching, etc. and user-facing elements such as branding with ease.
It is our recommendation that the core functionality of this initial version of the site NOT use a single-page app (SPA) with a backend API approach. Separate front-end and back-end implementations are inherently more work to implement and maintain vs. a server-side rendered (SSR) web application. APIs to be used by client-created frontends should be provided in a followup grant. It is unlikely that the initial use case for this platform (hosting company) will have ample engineers and designers to bike shed over aesthetics. While it is obvious other products can be built onto a platform that has all the information for a hosting company, that is a much greater scope than focusing on delivering a functional, performant, and easily extensible platform to manage a fleet of hotspots.
This functionality will be built into the Django admin as much as possible. We will provide one custom default theme that highlights that this is a Helium application. As permitted by the Helium Foundation, this can include their branding so the relationship is illuminated. A good overview of Django Admin can be found here.
Roadmap: