Chattanooga Digital: A Platform for Your Platform

What is a “platform”?

It's something to build on, stand on, work from, something sturdy and dependable. When multiple parties transparently share a platform, it is “infrastructure.” If you really need to depend on it, you must own it… and maintain it.

In tech parlance, a platform is a system that enables users to deploy applications — software for a particular purpose — for others to use. The app could be a simple website or PDF file (which can be used for many things in many ways) or as complex as an AI-enhance industrial control system or global networks of collaborating professionals. The system fits the concept: people build, deploy, maintain, and operate apps for other people.

If you want something that generates more benefits than costs, with relatively low costs, that grows and functions sustainably over a relatively long period, particularly in internet time, years or even decades, you probably want to control it. You don’t want someone else to take the benefits and stick you with the costs, impede the growth, or cut the functionality.

How can you do that without having to be a techie and invest a lot of time in building and maintaining the infrastructure? The answer is a cooperative platform-as-a-service, which is what Chattanooga.Digital is.

Chattanooga.Digital’s mission means being a platform for our community’s platforms, infrastructure for members to build platforms they own. That is what is required for people to easily and economically access, control, own, and use open source software for their own purposes — business, family, personal, social — whatever they may be.

Specifically, our platform consists of Portainer running Docker containerized apps supported by swarms of hosts (computers used to run software for others) behind a Traefik reverse proxy server as a load balancer. Technically, this platform can be expanded and extended to thousands of containers, each with at least one app and possibly numerous users. In concept, most open source apps can be deployed on this platform, including services such as AI, directory, search, and transaction processing that can be utilized by multiple platforms.

In other words, our platform can accommodate any software you need. You own it. You control it. It is yours. And, if we get enough people on the platform, it becomes very economical for all of us. Pretty cool, eh? The other cool thing is that our platform can be easily replicated for other communities in other places. Once that happens it becomes really easy to connect the local to the local without big corporations or political boundaries getting in the way.

Starting small — we can run any little app for you — but thinking big. This is how we build a better tomorrow.

Would you like to help us build or just use our platform? Chattanooga.Digital is seeking pilot members! Join here.