I´m fascinated by your idea and ideals and I whish you all the best for your project and the spirit behind it!
After reading your indiegogo presentation and parts of this forum some question remain, yet
(Sorry if I oversaw that this has been asked before):
After launching this project, if I got it right, the running cots of Outernet will be gained by selling parts of the data content stream to people or companys, giving them the right to feed their own data-“content” into the Outernet. (See Perk “5 Lanterns + Content” on Indiegogo).
Let´s be so honest: A great deal of this private “content” will be advertising, straight or hidden one.
As long as this doesn´t interfere with the neutrality of the other content you will broadcast, I´m fine with this type of financing.
But could you please give a statement on the proportion of this “hired content” compared to the “neutral” information you intend to broadcast? I didn´t find any clues on that topic on your webpages.
You could e.g. say: max. 2% of the broadcast data will be advertisment.
Or: We want to pay our costs and wages, but we´re a non-profit organisation which will stop selling advertisement packages as soon as we covered our monthly spendings. (budget information is public).
This would make me trust this more. It would be very sad if this project would turn out to be just another private company who sells 50% advertising and 50% infotainment.
We’re currently working on content goals and policies. Most of it will answer your questions, I think. Btw, we don’t currently support advertising at all. So that’s still open to discussion.
Its good to hear that you will have policies around paid for content. In general i’d imagine that this paid for content will be content that promotes products and services?
To my understanding the majority of sponsored content will be content companies want access to via Outernet’s service. For instance, team a is in southern africa doing x in a location without preconfigured infrastructure. It would be cheaper to pay outernet to broadcast the data and recieve it with a pillar than to subscribe to other services that would accomplish the same thing.
That makes a lot more sense, thinking about it that way. I was imaging big corporate ads. So for this example would they encrypt their info or if for some reason sponsored content was general knowledge could it be made available to everyone?
Sponsored content will not be encrypted. For sending encrypted information, there are other ways, such as the files section, and such data is not considered ‘content’.