Fedora Commons Technology Roadmap V0.9

Vision

Anchor
vision vision

Overview

Fedora Commons was incorporated in May 2007 and startup funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation was granted in July 2007. Since that time, all business functions have been created and the new organization has been staffed. Fedora Commons has been granted federal and New York status 501(c)3 status. The Fedora software was developed as a joint project of Cornell University and the University of Virginia funded by the Mellon Foundation starting in 2001. The architecture resulted from the pioneering work of Sandy Payette and Carl Lagoze later joined by Thornton Staples and Rosser Wayland. With over ten releases of the software and having developed world-wide adoption, the need to create an organization to foster and develop the Fedora and its related technologies resulted in the formation of Fedora Commons.

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We believe that a holistic approach to understanding the needs of our community and providing a sustainable open community, combined with open standards and open source software, is likely to provide the best platform for long term viability of the world's information and immediate utility for its use. This does not necessarily mean open access to all information since the rights of organizations, institutions and individuals must be respected. However, there must be no proprietary technological barrier that prevents accomplishing our mission and the missions of our community. Additionally, content owners must not be expected to yield their rights simply to use software or practices we provide. While we are a non-profit corporation, however, we believe that constructive engagement with profit making organizations is necessary to reach our goals.

Many of the organizations that Fedora Commons serves have substantial overlap in their requirements for content-related solutions. This provides us with an opportunity to develop technology that satisfies common needs reducing the cost and time it takes to develop content-related information systems. We have also found that many of these organizations have unique elements to their needs or already have investments in applications or infrastructures that they must continue to use. Recent trends in software development architectures and technologies make it practical to create semi-customized solutions from re-useable components and services. Fedora Commons has selected two of the most effective trends to guide development of its technologies: Service Oriented architectures (SOA) and the Web architecture. In addition, Fedora Commons will incorporate semantic technologies and model-driven architectures as these trends become practical. Organizations or solution developers can integrate Fedora Commons-supplied components in different ways, combined with their own locally-developed components and legacy systems, into solutions that meet their unique and individual requirements.

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The Fedora Commons Technology Roadmap combines a description of the requirements we plan to support and the release plans for our software development projects. This first generation roadmap was prepared as a result of the first Fedora Architecture Summit held in April 2007, the formation of the Fedora Commons organization through the Moore Foundation grant, and a series of meetings held with our community including the Mellon Foundation and a number of the projects it funds. We are developing a transparent community process for authoring future versions of the roadmap, so this roadmap should be considered a living document whose next version will be prepared by the new process.

For this roadmap, we have adopted a process and terminology similar to that used by Eclipseeclipse, and adapted to suit Fedora Commons (http://www.eclipse.org/org/councils/roadmap_v3_0/index.php2007 eclipse roadmap). There are three main sections to the roadmap:

1. Vision - – Information on the Fedora Commons organization and its strategic goals.
2. Themes and Priorities - – Describes the application areas, strategic use cases, and requirements characterizing the purposes and needs which Fedora Commons is working to satisfy. This section also helps describe the scope and priority for our work.
3. Release Plans - – Lists Fedora Commons' development projects and their work products including a timeline for their availability.

Over time the activities of Fedora Commons will grow but these activities must be prioritized by considerations of the scope in which Fedora Commons can be successful and the sustainability of the code base. The scale of our efforts is profoundly dependent on having a supportive community ecosystem contributing to the work.

This roadmap will be documented in several forms. The master and most complete form will be located on the Fedora Commons Web site. Using a Web site permits us to create a set of linked documents that the reader may explore based on interest and depth. The roadmap will also be published in a document form that is more condensed. Finally, the roadmap will be provided as an executive summary.

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