Your interest and involvement
I am the Founder of Krellian Ltd. and lead developer of Krellian Kiosk, a web runtime for interactive kiosks and digital signage. I would like to contribute to turning it into an Ubuntu Appliance.
Audience
Krellian Kiosk is primarily aimed at businesses in sectors like retail, hospitality, tourism and shared offices where they have a need for interactive kiosks or digital signage (e.g. digital billboards, self-service kiosks, departure boards, information boards, interactive exhibits, wayfinding kiosks and digital menus). However, as a general purpose kiosk web runtime for displaying passive or interactive web content it has a range of applications for business and home use where a single web application needs to be displayed full screen (e.g. for smart home control or rendering slide decks at conferences).
Software considerations
Krellian Kiosk is an Electron and Node.js-based application which already runs on Linux and has a work-in-progress snap package for Ubuntu Core using mir-kiosk. Krellian Kiosk is licensed under GPLv3.
Hardware considerations
The appliance is initially targeting the Raspberry Pi 3, but I would like it to run on a range of industrial PCs and touch-based hardware in the future. The appliance requires an HD TV or monitor and an Ethernet or Wi-Fi network connection and can optionally support input devices like a touchscreen or mouse and keyboard.
Security considerations
The appliance could benefit from secure boot or full disk encryption but does not require them.
Krellian Kiosk acts as a local web server so that it can be remotely controlled via the Web of Things and a self-hosted web interface. Access will be authenticated via a password/JSON Web Token, but local access will only be able to use plain HTTP due to inherent limitations TLS on local networks. Krellian Kiosk can therefore optionally be used in conjunction with Krellian Console which will be a hosted service providing secure remote access via a TLS dynamic tunneled reverse proxy.
Privacy
Krellian Kiosk does not currently collect any private user data. In future it may use anonymous pings for usage analytics and optionally collect some private user data for the purposes of signing up to the Krellian Console service. Krellian’s general Privacy Policy can be found here.
Maintenance considerations
Apart from the maintenance of the Krellian Kiosk snap itself, the appliance would depend on upstream software including Electron (maintained by GitHub) and mir-kiosk (maintained by Canonical).
I’d be grateful for any help from Canonical or the Ubuntu community in getting this appliance up and running.