T-server

Many social ventures need dependable digital infrastructure but lack the time, specialist staff or budget to assemble and maintain it themselves. Good Inno Tech is beginning work to open source T-server: a platform that brings together content, data, search, automation and application hosting.

For six years T-server has underpinned a licensed electricity supply company in the UK. It also has potential in narrower use cases, for example media monitoring, smart farming, open-source intelligence, smart homes and document processing.

T-server is currently installed using minimalist scripts and some manual steps. One production instance runs on macOS on Mac mini hardware. The aim of this project is to create an open source distribution, based on open standards, that organisations can deploy flexibly on their own hardware or virtual machines.

T-server is currently a closed source project, funded through consulting and licensing fees from customers who use it. It comprises:

  1. Headless CMS and content authoring: Payload provides structured content, media management and editorial workflows.
  2. Search and data exploration: Elasticsearch and Kibana provide real-time indexing, search and operational visibility.
  3. Interactive data applications: JupyterHub and HoloViz Panel support rich, interactive visualisations and tools powered by Python.
  4. Workflow and orchestration: Prefect manages data pipelines, background jobs and scheduled processes.
  5. Data storage: PostgreSQL and InfluxDB support transactional and time-series datasets.
  6. API and compute: FastAPI provides a lightweight, extensible interface for services and integrations.

Ongoing research and development will turn this proven but environment-specific platform into a reproducible, openly licensed NixOS reference deployment for data-intensive social ventures, supported by lifecycle tooling, documentation and validation.

The project is not another ERP, hosting platform or Linux distribution. It starts below individual business applications, providing a common digital foundation on which they can be deployed, integrated and governed.

Applications such as Odoo, ERPNext and Nextcloud can be consumers of T-server rather than part of the platform itself. T-server provides the underlying services that these and bespoke applications need to work together.

The broader idea is a reference digital foundation for organisations: more than somewhere to run software, but less than a prescribed suite of business applications. The project will distil years of enterprise architecture experience into a digital bedrock that a small, mission-driven organisation can adopt in days rather than years.

We are beginning by inviting expressions of interest from fellow Social Venture Network Sweden members. We would particularly like to hear from engineers interested in helping make T-server reproducible and openly available, and from social ventures willing to explore their needs with us or take part in early testing. No commitment is required at this stage; please contact us if you would like to start a conversation.