Opensource Hosting Management Platform

[jcronyn]

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

  • https://github.com/jcronyn
  • https://gitlab.com/jcronyn

• Joshua Miller

  • https://github.com/thecardcheat
  • https://gitlab.com/joshuamiller

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.

• Individuals and companies providing honest hosting services are providing positive edge growth for the network.
• This open-sourced software will enable many entities to continue to expand rapidly and successfully manage their fleet.
• The network will continue to experience more responsible edge growth by promoting small hosting companies.

The final deliverable for this project will be a Python based application that meets the following criteria.

• Available to run locally as well as in the cloud as a dockerized application
• Python application will leverage Django as the basis for the project tech stack
• Rich-featured platform will include the following high-level functionality
  • Asset Management
  • Host / Install Management
  • Hotspot / Wallet Management
  • Hotspot Monitoring and Alerting
  • Commissions / Payment Calculations
  • Tax Considerations & Calculations for Hosting Provider & Hosts

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:

Milestone + Date	Deliverable	Summary	Cost
MS1, Q3-2022	Core modeling, helium-py integration, usable CDK for IaC deploy.	Django app with appropriate db models, real-time interaction with the blockchain, and configurable alerts, etc. Open to approved alpha/beta testers.	50,000 USD
MS2, Q3/Q4-2022	Payments/commission history - tax data. Complete remaining test coverage.	Expand real-time blockchain API interaction to pull payments data for commissions and create scannable QR to generate bulk payments. Fill in testing if applicable.	25,000 USD
MS2, Q4-2022	Project completion, additional documentation, and community engagement.	Final Project Updates and Completion. Create a video overview of the platform and write a blog on the process and how to get started with the tool. Handoff to DeWi Github, etc.	12,500 USD

[ClarissaDeWi]

Hello again @jcronyn 👋 Thanks for submitting another grant proposal. Our team is taking a closer look and will respond in the next two weeks.