Community; Software; Sustainability
Rob began by clearing up any lingering identity issues around the current work on Fedora 4. In the early days of organizing interest around re-architecting Fedora the effort was named Fedora Futures. Cartalano said, " Fedora Futures = Fedora". They are now one and the same.
The effort began because stakeholder institutions came together in 2012 to address the fact that Fedora was not being maintained. DuraSpace was also not able to collect enough revenue to pay for ongoing development.
There are more than 300+ Fedora implementations and only 41 Fedora Sponsors. in order to reach the goal of sustaining a process for developing software an ongoing communtiy building effort is part of the project's goals.
A beta release of Fedora 4 is due out this summer. The team is engaged in a dynamic, iterative development process and are cmmitmented to Feodra as a product.
Eddie Shin began work towards a new Fedora with rapid development phases called "sprints" that continue today under the technical leadership of Andrew Woods (11 sprints have been completed towards the release of Fedora 4).
The development process has been open and priorities have been selected by the community. Setting goals is a transparent process. He reminded the audience that by contributing code, use cases and resources the process gets better. Fedora 4 development is great example of successful teamwork.
Cartalano wondered about what the "steady state" for building a well-maintained and vibrant open source software platform would look like over the long term. The Fedora 4 project is initially funded for three years. To keep the vibrant community process alive the team is beginning to discuss options for addressing future sustainability.
Cartalano sees areas for growth and innovations.There is interest in exploring a Fedora and VIVO collaboration. Dean Kraft suggested in comments that the Linked Data for libraries project will bring VIVO closer to where DSPace and Fedora "live"
