Hosting arrangements for traffic data applications

[Holly-Transport]

One potential benefit of the pool would be to make it easier for TNCs to provide a valuable service to government counterparts through the traffic data applications.

If these applications were hosted by the pool, some level of effort would be necessary to support admin, technical support, map-centering, etc. One thought may be to charge a fee for hosted applications, based on a sliding scale relative to a country’s GDP. The fees could be used to support app hosting costs, and could, conceivably, be paid back to the TNCs, in proportion to the amount of data they contribute to a particular government’s jurisdiction.The TNCs logos could also appear on the application.

A possible benefit of central hosting would be to concentrate global developers’ efforts on the improvement of a refined pool of applications?

Alternatively, we could look at models where the hosting and support arrangements are worked out locally by the data contributors and third parties – something to discuss.

[kpwebb]

These are key questions. In the current proposed structure I definitely see the pooling entity as playing a role in hosting analysis applications for local government. However as raised above there are a lot of things to figure out about sustainability both in terms of continued development of the applications and operating costs.

Given the distributed nature of this project we can support a variety of models including pool hosted, gov't self-hosted applications (in the self-hosted application the pool would still be providing the data for free, as it would to any user). But as pointed out above the ability to include third-parties (e.g. contributing TNCs) in that relationship is critical, as recognition of their data contributions is a key factor in participation.

In the pool hosted model I like the idea of a sliding scale. We'll need to find a way to test the market on this to see both how valuable the application/data is to cities and to what extent wealthier cities are willing to subsidize the project. Fortunately I think the dollar values we're talking about are small but we'll need to include this in our operating/financial plan for the pooling entity, and decide when/how to reach out and collect data to validate any assumptions on price.

Curious to get input from @drewda & @meghanhade here as this may relate to thinking on other urban planning/analysis tools.