tyson

For My Country

Dear Santa,

Here are some things I’d like for our country this Christmas, in 2016, and beyond:

• Safety & security: we should be the safest country in the planet. Whether walking, biking, driving, flying, riding, we should top the charts in safety. I’m a Texan, have a license to carry, but obtaining a leathal weapon shouldn’t be easier than it is to qualify for piloting an aircraft. No question in my mind that most of the people in the CHL class I attended would shoot themselves in the leg pulling a gun from a holster under duress.
• Wellness: we should be the healthiest nation on the planet. Lots of benefits to that.
• Cleanliness: we should be the cleanest country on the planet. Best air, best water, best soil.
• Frugality: waste is nauseating. It takes effort to make a dollar. If the government can’t be lean and efficient, it doesn’t deserve our money. Our Government is also bad at operating many things, so less of that.
• Equality: we’re all human. Treat others like you want to be treated. Pretty simple.
• Innovation. We’re landing rockets, driving electric cars, flying robots, making super phones. More of this. Attract and retain talent. While we’re at that, we shouldn’t have to wait in line at the DMV, ‘fax it’ in, or fill out tax forms. When we interact with government, the reaction should be “wow, high tech”, “A+ customer service”, net promoter score of 10. I’m not generally a fan of configurators, but maybe instead of politicians we should just have a bunch of configurators for the country. Put 'em up on Facebook, configure the governement services you want provided.
• Best country to work in or have a business. Our legal and tax framwork encourages corporate and intellectual property emigration. We ship manufacturing abraod. We should be the best game in town. It’s a no brainer to move your company to Ireland if you can take advantage of a 69% reduction in taxes and the total net benefit is positive.
• Oh, and build a giant wall around the country (kidding). That’s idiotic.

List subject to change.

Privatized ATC →

Long time, no post!

I look forward to reading Rep. Schuster’s proposal. I’m a skeptic on this one, but keeping an open mind. Many questions:

• Who will own the ‘non profit’ NewCo? 
  
• What rights will the shareholders / members have? 
• Can NewCo be bought / sold?
• Who will sit on the board and how are voting rights determined?
• What is the business model? 
• What assets (and valuation) are transferred to the new entity? 
• What access will the public have to the organizations products and services?
• What are the incentives to innovate?
• Ultimately, will this just end up deck chair rearranging with the addition of user fees and reduced benefits for certain stakeholders? 
  

My fear is the long game being played is a tax hike scheme, and that without a real incentive (profit, increasing enterprise value, free market, etc.) the efficiency benefits don’t materialize. 

Quite a puzzle.

The ‘A’ in ADS-B is for awesome. This technology continues to amaze. 

These screenshots were captured with ForeFlight Mobile connected to the Stratus 2 ADS-B weather and traffic receiver en route from PHLI to PHNL during Hurricane Ana. 

It’s rare - and maybe a first - to capture a hurricane so close via ADS-B.

MarkOps

We’ve added a new role at ForeFlight: MarkOps. This is short for “Marketing Operations” and is a first cousin to DevOps. Our DevOps ninja will usher in the era of MarkOps at ForeFlight, helping our Director of Marketing execute on a wide range of technology driven marketing initiatives.

Here’s the Wikipedia definition I’m proposing:

MarkOps is a technology driven marketing operations method that stresses communication, collaboration and integration between marketing professionals and software developers. MarkOps is a response to the interdependence of software development and marketing operations. It aims to help an organization rapidly produce effective marketing capabilities and execute on technology driven marketing and customer interaction initiatives.

The particulars will include things like analytics, automated email marketing list curation, segmentation, bounce management, marketing automation platform management, stat gathering / reporting, and CRM integration and optimization. A good MarkOps dev will fearlessly and competently sling code, manage systems, anticipate, improvise, and continuously refine and improve the craft.

Sidebar: In re-reading the Wikipedia definition of DevOps to borrow what I could for the MarkOps definition, the references to “IT Professionals” and “IT Operations” irritated. In so many companies, folks hate the IT department. Writing “IT Professional” as my occupation would make me sad. IT Professional doesn’t seem to intuitively associate with words like like ‘craftsman’ or 'artist’, which I think are apropos words for great software developers. 

IT != software development in my world view, and I have a intuition that really effective, efficient companies of the now and future are, at their core, software companies - or at least really damn good at software development. Functional areas - from marketing to finance to HR - have to master software systems and likely master weaving them together and getting the most out of them, and that takes dev talent. So, I don’t see MarkOps as a sub-discipline of IT … it is a specialization of someone who a software developer that just so happens to also make a great systems administrator.

We will have some fun building up our MarkOps capabilities. Maybe we’ll even share some recipes.

On Open and Machine Readable. And Change is Hard.

On May 9, the President signed an executive order declaring that the “default state of new and modernized Government information resources shall be open and machine readable”. In Section 1, General Principals, the order intelligently highlights the benefits that weather data and the GPS have had on our lives, with downstream benefits like “navigation systems, weather newscasts and warning systems, location-based applications, precision farming tools, and much more.”

Aviators - and the innovative companies that have used these assets to create solutions for aviation - have benefited. It is hard to imagine aviation without GPS, without Internet weather, without datalink weather, without the ASDI feeds that power flight tracking. When I look at the iPad - and even our own app - it is awesome to see what all these systems and this data have enabled.  The executive order lays out the vision, but getting from here (lots of data / info that are not machine readable and easy to access) to there (machine readable and easy to access) will cause agency writhing.

The FAA has posted a draft data and information distribution policy. Based on the draft, I foresee a tough transition. One can imagine that agencies that have operated in a closed, protected environment will have a hard time swallowing the fact that unrestricted, uninhibited access to data is a good thing. I fully expect braking pressure in many areas, and it is on the community to spot this and challenge it. Letting go is hard.

Open access to things like FAA datasets and the products they produce for public benefit is a fantastic thing. FAA should remove as many barriers as possible to let it flow. We cannot imagine all the great things that will come from this. And it will create jobs and advance the state of the art.

I cannot imagine a supportable argument that open access to weather data and GPS information has had negative impacts on society. I think in time we will say the same for FAA data - in fact, this is already observable. Look at the aviation apps market, at sites like FlightAware - awesome. Generally, the precedent is that open access to data, information, and government products has improved quality of life and encouraged innovation and entrepreneurship.

In the recent past, FAA’s AeroNav made arguments in conflict with the Order: that open access to data creates a safety concern. No data was presented though - just opinion and use of the safety billy club to create shock. I expect more of the same. The FAA’s draft data and information distribution policy is broad enough that one can imagine many creative arguments in support of closed and controlled. Expect to hear lots of arguments about “safety” when all others fail.

Avgeeks, devs, entrepreneurs, and anyone else passionate about open data: take time to comment on the FAA’s proposed information and data distribution policy.

Here’s an excerpt (and some comments):

The FAA will:

1. Not allow external users to connect (physically/logically) to authoritative sources of data/information. FAA data/information distribution will only be distributed externally from FAA approved replicated sources.

What is an “FAA approved replicated source”? What are the criteria for approval?

2. Make electronic data/information available on a non-exclusive basis to external users, subject to the limits imposed by the need to protect national/homeland security, individual privacy, safety, confidentiality, and other government requirements.

The executive order says that agencies “shall ensure that they safeguard individual privacy, confidentiality, and national security.” The FAA added the catchalls “safety” and “other government requirements”, expanding the ways in which it can defend closed. 

3. Limit distribution to only that data/information products created for FAA purposes.

What products are “created for FAA purposes” and what are not? Are digital aeronautical charts, for example, created for FAA purposes? The ASDI feed?

4. Distribute readily available data/information without intentional delay, subject only to the limits imposed by resources (both current and prospective), contracts, technology, authority, regulation and data quality while protecting security, privacy, and confidentiality.

What is readily available and what is not? Shouldn’t systems that are not readily available be made so?

Provide access to data/information over secure and controlled connections (logical) and in accordance with the most recent federal systems security standards including those issued by the National Security Agency, Department of Defense, and the National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST) standards.

HTTP, HTTPS, APIs. Next.

Requiring folks register for an account is a reasonable practice. I don’t think it is unreasonable to know who is accessing information - it makes notifications simpler. Once registered, though, data and information products should be accessible via HTTP.

6. Consider cost and cost recovery in making FAA data/information available to external users.

One problem here is that costs never seem to go down in government agencies. In a default state that is open and machine readable, I can imagine offloading of work to the dozens of startups that openness can foster. That should drive down costs. AeroNav, for instance, instead of terminating the folks that are no longer needed to support the direct sales business it abruptly shed, is retraining and redeploying them. So, costs stay somewhat the same. And those should be recoverable? Not cool.

We can all imagine for a moment how much it would have cost the FAA to build a site like my friends at FlightAware did using the FAA’s ASDI feed: tens of millions of dollars, it would be late and over budget, it would likely make your eyes bleed, it would break frequently (like the FAA’s TFR site), and it would be offline for a few days at a time each year because the contractor sysadmin doesn’t work weekends.

Open will drive down FAA costs. Imagine all the NEXT GEN source code sitting in a Github repo. It would probably get torn to bits by a motivated set of 10xers (developers that can produce 10x the output of your average dev), rewritten, and work.

7. Consider requests for data and information that is not readily available if external users can and do bear the full cost of development, connection, transmission, processing, and maintenance.

The default state is open and machine readable and easily accessible. The FAA needs the leadership and planning necessary to make readily available the data and information that is not currently readily available. 

8. Not be responsible for the quality, accuracy or continued availability of the data and information once released. While the data distributed is accurate and timely for use by the FAA, we are not responsible for quality, continuity, or intended use of data for third parties.

Fair enough. This one can stay :)

9. Define the extent to which FAA contractors can reuse FAA data in their custody or control.

No. Heard of ITT Exelis? They manage the ADS-B system. And, they have the exclusive rights to re-distribute the ADS-B target data and charge a fee for that information. Taxpayers funded the system. Subject to privacy and national security, that information is rightfully the people’s. The FAA’s duty now should be to write contracts in a way that ensures the Order is honored, subject to the order’s limitations. 

Similar situations exist with government aeronautical data that third parties collect and curate under government contracts. In an open, easily accessible default state, contracts like that should never get written

10. Apply this proposed policy requirement consistently and transparently.

Fair enough.

Adopting open, easily accessible mindset is going to require a systematic change in the way FAA staff and contractors approach systems development and information management. Ultimately, though, an open FAA should drive innovation, should encourage entrepreneurship, and should advance the state of the art.

Adopting an open, easily accessible mindset will also hopefully change the way that contracts are written with FAA contractors. It isn’t well known that, for example, ITT Exelis has the exclusive rights to distribute and profit from distribution of the ADS-B target data that flows through their computers (jaw on the floor when I heard about that). The ADS-B system and its data is taxpayer funded, and a contract exists that prevents this information from being accessed without paying a contractor for it. .

One last crazy parting thought: the FAA should post every bit of source code it writes or a contractor writes for it to Github.